No buttes about it: Monument Valley is truly spectacular
I love Western movies, particularly those directed by the great John Ford, such as The Searchers and Stagecoach.
Famously, he shot these with the backdrop of the spectacular Monument Valley, an incredible landscape.
Now, I would like to know more about the valley, such as its origin, size and who lived there?–l.
As well as Ford’s classics, Monument Valley has been seen in films including Clint Eastwood’s The Eiger Sanction, Easy Rider and Forrest Gump.
It has been in countless television shows such as Doctor Who, in music videos and album covers by The Eagles, Kanye West, Metallica and Led Zeppelin. Located on the Arizona–utah border, Monument Valley is characterised by a cluster of vast sandstone buttes – flat-topped, steep-sided towers of rock – the largest reaching 1,000ft (300m) above the valley floor.
Covering just five square miles (13sq km) the valley was formed millions of years ago, as material that eroded from the early Rocky Mountains deposited layer upon layer of sediment until what was once a basin became a plateau at around 5-6,000ft above sea level.
Over the last 50 million years, wind and rain has eroded that plateau, leaving behind the magnificent buttes we see today. Many of the buttes have been given names, such as the Totem
Pole, the East and West Mittens, Elephant Butte and The Three Sisters.
The earliest people to inhabit the area were the Anasazi, or Ancestral Puebloans, who settled in around 1,200 BC.
Later, the Navajo people came to dominate, and 250,000 of their descendants still live on the 27,000sq-mile Navajo Nation, spread across Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.