Monument Valley

Monument Valley, on the Arizona–Utah border within the Navajo Nation, is one of the most iconic landscapes in the American West — a broad desert plain studded with towering, isolated sandstone buttes and spires that rise as much as 1,000 feet from the valley floor. The deep red rock, the vast empty space, and the dramatic silhouettes have made it a symbol of the Southwest, familiar from countless Western films and photographs.

The buttes are erosional remnants, the last hard-capped survivors of rock layers that once covered the whole region, slowly stripped away by wind and water over millions of years to leave these freestanding monuments. The valley sits high on the Colorado Plateau, and its sweeping views are managed by the Navajo Nation as a tribal park. It is a landscape of scale and silence rather than a single peak or canyon.