Monument Valley, UT - Page, AZ

Here it is, May 20th and we arrived Page, AZ today after spending yesterday at Monument Valley Utah. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and the scenes we saw on the road from Santa Fe to Monument Vally, then beyond to Page AZ, are worth much more. Now, you all know I am a man of intricate, verbose, and over descriptive narrative, but I will try to be kind and just show a lot of photos, with short titles, to fill this particular post. It will not happen all the time though.

Remember, you can double-click on the photos to enlarge them.

First though, I am going to quote verbatim, from a pamphlet we were given by the Native American owners of the View Motel. www.monumentvalleyview.com regarding the geology of the region.

"Monument Valley was created beneath the Earth's surface. During the Paleozoic Era - about 570 million years ago, the entire Colorado Plateau was underneath the Gulf of Mexico, which brushed against the young sediments of the Rocky Mountains.

Uplift from the Earth's mantle caused the ocean floor to crack while the sea subsided west during the shifting of the Pacific and North American Plates. At the end of the Jurassic Period - about 65 million years ago, the mud from the ocean floor became sand stone held together by the Organ Rock formation and the mountain sediments such as limestone. In certain places you will see ancient volcano plugs that turned into Basalt- an igneous rock formation. With continuous erosion from water and wind, you are seeing one of the most amazing places in natures creation." On this map, Monument Valley is just north of Kayenta, AZ on the border between the two states.

The Drive to Monument Valley From Santa Fe.






View from our room at the Mountain View Lodge. Words, even mine, can not describe this place.










The trip from Monument Valley UT to Page AZ. Page is a city built at the time of construction of the Glen Canyon Dam 50 years ago, so everything is fairly new. You can see in the photos how steep the canyon walls are and also, how low the water level behind the dam is.












The next group is of Antelope Canyon. This very narrow and twisty formation is caused by a lot of water building up in a small box canyon and over millions of years, finding a way out by eroding the weaker parts in the soft stone.

We are off this morning, Friday May 21st, to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. There will be plenty of awesome photos from there. At 8000 feet, one thousand feet higher then the south rim, we expect to see some wonderful sights. I will share them with you in my next post.