Monument Valley

Monument Valley is located on the Utah-Arizona state line, near the Four Corners area. The valley is a sacred area that lies within the territory of the Navajo Nation Reservation, the Native American people of the area.

Monument Valley has been featured in many forms of media since the 1930s. Most famously, director John Ford used the location for a number of his Westerns; critic Keith Phipps wrote that "its five square miles have defined what decades of moviegoers think of when they imagine the American West.

Before human existence, the park was once a lowland basin. For hundreds of millions of years, materials that eroded from the early Rock Mountains deposited layer upon layer of sediment which cemented a slow and gentle uplift, generated by ceaseless pressure from below the surface, elevating these horizontal strata quite uniformly one to three miles above sea level. What was once a basin became the Colorado plateau. Natural forces of wind and water that eroded the land spent the last 50 million years cutting into and peeling away at the surface of the plateau. The simple wearing down of altering layers of soft and hard rock slowly revealed the natural wonders of Monument Valley today.

From the visitor center, you see the world-famous panorama of the Mitten Buttes and Merrick Butte.