Monument Valley is a stretch of red desert on the Arizona–Utah border, on Navajo land, where towers of sandstone stand up to 300 metres off a flat plain, and it is the world's picture of the West because John Ford filmed his westerns here from 1939 on. The towers are mesas caught mid-collapse: a hard sandstone cap protects the soft shale beneath until the edges crumble, and a mesa shrinks to a butte, a butte to a spire, and a spire to nothing. The Mittens are the famous pair, two buttes with a thumb of rock standing off each, framed with Merrick Butte from the terrace of the View Hotel, where people gather before the sun clears the horizon and the red rock catches the first light. The rough Valley Drive loops through the park past the base of the buttes to John Ford's Point, the outcrop where the director set his cameras and where a Navajo rider on a horse still poses for the same shot.
The valley belongs to the Navajo Nation, and most of it is off-limits without a Navajo guide, which is where the quiet places are: arches, petroglyphs and the hogans, the traditional round homes, that families still live in among the rocks. The Navajo read the whole valley as a giant hogan, with two northern pinnacles, Gray Whiskers and Sentinel Mesa, standing as its door posts. The one walk allowed without a guide is the Wildcat Trail, a loop of about six kilometres that drops onto the valley floor and circles West Mitten Butte through sand and sage, with the towers changing shape at every turn. Hollywood found the valley in the Depression, when Harry Goulding, a trader who lived beside the buttes, drove to California with photographs hoping a film crew would bring paid work to the Navajo; Ford came, and came back nine times. On dark nights, far from any city, the Milky Way arches clean over the buttes. Monument Valley is a landscape most people have seen a hundred times before they arrive, and it is still bigger than the screen.