Monument Valley is a protected area located on Navajo land near the Utah and Arizona state lines. You have probably seen it before in movies, as it is one of the most-used backdrops for westerns that are illustrating the American southwest. Because Monument Valley is made up of a cluster of red sandstone buttes that tower as high as 1,000 feet over the desert floor, it is an iconic landscape that translates well in both movies and photographs. One of the more recent blockbusters that showed Monument Valley as a primary location for filming was “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” in which you may remember the son fashioning one of the buttes out of mashed potatoes! The entire area of Monument Valley is roughly five miles of the Colorado Plateau, and is tourable by driving, hiking, hot air balloon and many other methods of transport. Of course, we prefer the comfort of our busses to get to the best locations, then we can explore on foot if we want to!
Monument Valley is actually part of the Grand Circle, which is America’s largest concentration of national parks and monuments. It includes Monument Valley, Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Lake Powell, and the Four Corners region. For those unfamiliar with Four Corners Monument, where four states (Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah) meet, you can visit this area easily from Monument Valley. We offer our Monument Valley tours as part of our 3 day excursions that visit Bryce, Zion and the Grand Canyon as well. The reason for grouping these parks together into a longer trip is due to the cluster of the Grand Circle itself. We can minimize driving time by leaving Las Vegas and traveling to Zion, then to the other parks from there in a loop shape. This enables us to take advantage of the fact that each park is actually closer together than the distance to get to the first, so we spend less time on the road and more time exploring these awesome spaces.
Many will sit and gaze at the buttes and wonder how they were formed. They were created over the course of hundreds of thousands of years of slow moving rivers depositing silt into the area while also eroding the rock. This process created the dramatic towers that seem to rise straight up from the desert floor, when in reality it is the opposite and the desert floor was worn away around them. If you are interested in touring Monument Valley as part of our 3 day tour, we suggest spring and fall for the most temperate temperatures, although the area is beautiful and dramatic year round. Contact our representatives today to find out more about the tours we offer of this iconic area.