Monument Valley and Arches National Park

Good lord, how did Utah manage to grab itself such a generous portion of the gorgeous landscapes that the American West had to offer. On the road before Monument Valley and in between that and Arches, there's not a stretch of natural landscape that isn't majestic.

No small wonder that the Mormons chose to settle in a place that when the sun shines in literal beams onto the rocky landscape, looks more than a little Old Testament.

Monument Valley was a place on the map to me, one of those "must-sees" of the Southwest. Of course I recognized it later as something that's a catch-all in any movie of that's about the free-spiritedness of the out west, that and a salacious scene in Preacher. Thing about it is, that it's so expansive that unlike other national monuments, there isn't a single iconic shot of it that can capture all of it, so I didn't feel like I could even recognize it. I wasn't prepared for how spacious and gorgeous it is.

Funny is this first band of explorers, that knew they were giving names that might stand as long as people were there to gaze at these things were as struck as simple as we were.

"Those ones look kind of like oven mitts." One of us observes at nightfall staring out from the parking lot of the hotel at the formations we later find out are the Mitten Buttes of Monument Valley

"See, how that one looks like an elephant? The trunk's right there and - " Snake Eyes points at a cluster at Arches National Park that once we have oriented where we are on the map, we realize is The Parade of Elephants.

I like to chalk it up to the Aw Shucks spirit that the American West inspires.

Just the other day, I watched The Searchers, maybe the reason that this park is as associated with the movie Western culture as much as it is. The doomed Edwards clan conveniently set up their homestead plunk in the middle of the Monument Valley, even though theoretically, they lived in Texas.

Always got a kick out of that when I was watching Westerns, how people picked the most picturesque vistas possible to look at while they eked out their living dirt farming. I was all cynical and shit about it until I actually went out there and got it set straight for me that really, it would be more challenging for them to find themselves an ugly view.

Ford ended up filming 7 movies here. There's a vista point named after him. Good movie and all that, under all the racism, but I got a real kick out of them "searching all across the West for five years" when everything looked like it was in Monument Valley, sometimes the front and back views of the same buttes.

Later that day we make a quick stop at the Hole N The Rock. There's a fourteen room house carved into this rock, due to the peculiar ingenuity of Albert Christensen. It took him over 12 years to complete home. Couldn't find anything on how long it took him to do his earnest shrine to FDR above the home. There's also a sweet little cove where the Albert and his wife Gladys were buried, next to a little angel statue.

Outside is all the kitschy things that one could possibly put in their yard, a general store, and a couple of cute pieces of car art.

But it's time to get on the road again, heading to Arches National Park for more mind-melting awesome. I think we wound up going at the perfect time of year to get a full variety of climates. At the Grand Canyon it was in the mid-sixties. Pleasant, but not too hot for all the tramping around we were doing. Drive a bit further up and there's that perfect study in contrasting setting. Stretching out at our feet, the petrified dunes. Sandy, dotted with vegetation here and there. Springing up from that red rock formations. And spanning out in the distance behind them, distant blue-gray mountains sprinkled with snow. Just looks too perfect to be real.

In the presence of all that beauty, it is only natural that we pranced around, taking dozens of photos and clambered up and and down anywhere we could get ourselves a foothold. On the way out, I looked up at some of the more strikingly huge formations and hope to myself that there is some expanse at the top that a human has never managed to set foot on. An idea that I'm sure can't be true, and I'm not sure why I'm hoping for it, considering that I, like anyone else here is a looky loo, here to be amazed by what I see without necessarily understanding it, but the thought stayed with me.

And on through a sudden mini snow-squall up to Salt Lake City.