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This dramatic 42km-long Y-shaped gorge is considered by many to be the heart of the Navajo Nation. For a treat, book a private backcountry tour via Goulding’s Lodge with Navajo guide Larry Holiday, which includes the chance sleep under the stars.
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Stay: The Navajo-owned View Hotel lives up to its name: every guest room faces the Mittens.ĭo: Numerous Navajo operators offer guided tours. And if you’re lucky, you will feel that sacredness too ( ). You will see the dust storm of wild mustangs galloping in the distance. You will learn how yucca is harvested for basket weaving and juniper for bracelets. Travel here with a Navajo guide – on horseback, on foot or by 4WD – and you will see these wind-sculpted peaks transformed into thunderbirds and dragon tails. The real Monument Valley is in the backcountry, where a scattering of Navajo families still live the old way, off-grid and off the land, tending sheep the way their ancestors did for centuries. Come at dawn or dusk and they glow orange like embers in the midday heat, the landscape burns like the surface of Mars. The most iconic formation is the Mittens, two 300m-tall sandstone buttes that rise from the desert like huge gloved hands. Each one tells a story, each one is part of their history and identity. But, in truth, it’s the Indians, not the cowboys, who call this place home.įor the Navajo, these enormous sandstone outcrops are sacred, believed to be the carcasses of defeated monsters, slain by the Holy People, petrified and buried in the sand. The towering red-rock pinnacles and flat-top mesas of Monument Valley are one of the most iconic landscapes in America, and the setting for numerous Westerns.
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You have to listen to the stories and maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll feel the magic too. That’s important, because to truly understand America today, you have to see it through the eyes of the people that came first. More than 170,000 Navajo people – or Diné, as they call themselves – make their homes here, one foot in the modern world, one in a way of life that has changed little for centuries. It is the largest reservation in the country (bigger than Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire combined) and has its own language, government and cultural identity. The Navajo Nation is a 70,000 sq km sovereign state spread across the parched-yellow grasslands and burgundy mesas of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. It may say America on the map, but it feels like a different world. It is hidden in plain sight, woven between the cracks like flowers growing through paving. Listen and you’ll hear the medicine man’s fire, the drums of ancestors echoing on the wind.īut this is not some far-flung place. Golden buttes punch through the ground like giants' fists, the handprints of shamans mark the cliffs. Here, among the high desert plains and stark red canyons of the American Southwest, every rock and stone is steeped in myth and legend. In the land of the Navajo, the earth is alive and imbued with magic.