Monument Valley, Utah

Day 14-15 Monument Valley, Utah

From Colorado back into Utah, back to the beautiful red rock. We of course visited Four Corners, where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet. It was a little disenchanting to find that the original surveyors of the area made a mistake and the monument for the four corners is off about 7 miles….

I’m still amazed at how the land can be so flat and then all of a sudden there is a huge strangely shaped rock that seems to come from nowhere.

Just before the city of Mexican Hat, there is a rock that looks just like that, a Mexican hat.

We arrived in the area of our campground to find EVERYTHING named Goulding. Goulding grocery, Goulding Lodge, Goulding Museum, Goulding Gas, Goulding Tours, Goulding Campground. Come to find out Harry Goulding and his wife, Leone, first came to Monument Vallley in the early 1920s. They settled on a hilltop at the foot of a towering mesa, in a tent. They eventually built themselves a house. By 1928, they had constructed a trading post where they conducted business with local Navajo Indians. The Navajos would bring the Gouldings silver jewelry and hand-woven rugs in trade for food and supplies.

Monument Valley suffered greatly during the Depression, so in 1938, a desperate attempt to bring financial relief, Harry and his wife went to Hollywood, California, in search of a solution. They managed to convince Director John Ford that Monument Valley would be the perfect location for his next film, Stagecoach. Today, Monument Valley is still used as a location for movies, commercials, TV shows and magazine shoots. Eventually they built a small hotel which was named the 8th prettiest hotel, not because the rooms, but because of the beautiful scenery around.
We had a great “truck tour” led by a Navajo, who shared his memories of being raised by his grandparents.

Our first stop was to show us the “hogan” (mud hut). The smaller hut was used for cleansing. They would put hot rocks inside and make like a sauna, then they would drink herbs and go in the hut to sit & sweat out the herbal drink, which would cleanse their body.

The larger hut was used to live in. There is a wood burning stove in the center and the smoke would go out through the hole in the roof. Our guide said that when he was a boy, the winters were much colder and the fire kept them quite warm. If it snowed at night, they had a little difficulty opening their front door because it would snow half way up the door. The door to the huts were always built to face East for ritual purposes. Every morning he remembered his grandparents praying to the sunrise. The Hogan below is about 100 years old.

Monument Valley is a Navajo Tribal Park comprised of 30,000 acres, established in 1958. It is located on the Utah/Arizona border within the 16 million acre Navajo Reservation. They average 8 inches of rain per year and wouldn’t you know it, while we were there, it rained a few times. It apparently doesn’t rain as much as it used to because the Juniper trees that are very, very old no longer produce the berries that they once did.

Before human existence, Monument Valley was a vast lowland basin. For hundreds of millions of years layer upn layer of eroded sediment from the early Rocky Mountains was deposited in the basin and cemented into rock-mainly sandstone and limestone. Then a slow, gentle uplift created by constant pressure from below the surface elevated the horizontal strata, which now turned it into a plateau of solid rock 1000 feet high. The natural forces of wind and rain and temperature have spent the last 50 million years cutting and peeling away the surface of this plateau, creating these natural wonders that today stand between 400 and 1200 feet tall.

Among the monuments, we saw the mittens

The thumb (or was it the toe?)

The totem pole

The W
















This was the view from our campground.

We ended our day with a great sausage, green pepper and onion dinner.

Everyone took turns telling their funniest RV story and boy did they have some stories to tell!

Moab, Utah

Day 13-16 – Moab, Utah

We stopped at the Powell River History Museum.

John Wesley Powell was an amazing person. He explored the Green and Colorado River in the late 1800s, which was a feat in itself. But he did it with ONE ARM!

We arrived at the campground in time to get ready for Canyonlands Dutch Oven Dinner & boat ride with light and sound show. The ride was up the Colorado River and we were surprised to find that it was only waist deep water. At dark the light and sound show was VERY unique. There is a road that runs alongside the river. They run a truck on the road with a huge light system, which shines lights on the rocks while the music and narration is done in the boat. We are all wondering how in the world this guy is allowed to run a truck down this road shining bright lights! He’s been in business since 1965 so I guess he knows the right people.

Our first day in Moab was spent at Arches National Park. Water and ice, extreme temperatures, and underground salt movement are responsible for the sculptured rock scenery of Arches National Park. There are over 2,000 arches and we only saw about a dozen of them! Today, new arches are being formed and old ones destroyed.

Landscape Arch measures 306 feet base to base. In 1991 a rock slab 60 feet long, 11 feet thick fell from the underside, leaving behind a thinner ribbon of rock 6 feet thick. Probably the most unique arch is Delicate Arch, but we found out that Landscape Arch was really supposed to be named Delicate Arch, but when the signs were put up, they were put up incorrectly and wasn’t discovered until they had been displayed for quite some time, so they just stuck with the incorrect names. So, really the arch above, called Landscape, is really Delicate.

My favorite was the double arch. They call it the North and South Window.
Once you hike up to it, you can sit under it in the shade & there’s a really nice breeze and a beautiful view. The only thing we forgot was OUR LUNCH, which we left in the car!

Canyonland National Park is the largest national park in the state of Utah. It is divided into three districts by the Green and Colorado Rivers: the Island in the Sky, the Needles and the Maze. We only visited the Island in the Sky area, which sits atop a massive 1500 foot mesa. What beautiful views!

Dead Horse Point was once used as a corral for wild mustangs roaming on the mesa. It was a narrow neck of land surrounded by cliffs, a 2,000 foot drop down to the Colorado River. Cowboys chose the horses they wanted and for some reason left the other horses to die of thirst.
Just beside this area we found a couple of rocks that Marcia and I decided to “ham it up.”

We found a pretty cool arch in Canyonland. We checked it out and found that it had a crack between the cliff and the arch. We were not sure how it was being held up, but somebody actually got up on top of it while we were there!

We took a couple of hikes out to some of the viewpoints and of course Bill had to mark our trails. Check out the dirt road. Now that would be a cool motorcycle ride!

Bar-M Chuckwagon western show and cowboy supper was fantastic! Our evening started with a gun fight

and then we moved on to supper. Valerie was a recording artist in Nashville and Alan was a singer/songwriter and toured the world with “Up With People.” Alan played the Sheriff, cook, server, and singer and was the perfect host! After dinner we were entertained by Alan, Valerie and 3 others with old cowboy songs. A few of the guests were invited up on the stage to learn how to lasso.

The best part of the show was the “Butt Brothers” I think that’s what they called themselves. I took a lot of pictures, but I was laughing so hard, none of them turned out……but I did manage to get a photo from someone.
FINALLY, another free day. Most of the group went on the optional 4 hour river raft trip. OMG we had sooo much fun!














We were supposed to get water guns, but they forgot to bring them, so our groups used the buckets on board to “cool off” the group. What a fun water battle.

Then we hit small rapids and lost one of our guys, Tony, who was in a “ducky.” His wife, Brenda, was yelling at him to paddle and when she turned around, she found he wasn’t even in the boat!!!!
It was such an enjoyable day to meander down the river and have the guides do all the work. We needed the relaxation!

Well, maybe some of us didn’t have to work.