On October 1st 2019 I traveled from Moab to Monument Valley. I had a limited time in Monument Valley arriving in the late afternoon and leaving early in the morning for Zion. With only three weeks in the trip to cover a large swath of the Southwest I had to make it more of a scouting trip. I plan to come back here and stay longer. I arranged for a Navajo guide to take me to parts of the reservation only open to natives for sunset and night sky photos. We journeyed by the Three Sisters, The valley floor through the North Window, Western Mitten, Big Chief, Camel Butte, and saw petroglyphs at God’s Eye. The best part of the tour was hearing about the Navajo culture.

When you think of the Southwest you imagine Monument Valley made famous in those old movie westerns. For me it's all about the isolated red mesas and buttes surrounded by empty, sandy desert and crumbling formations rising hundreds of feet into the air. The last remnants of the sandstone layers that once covered the entire region. The area lies entirely within the Navajo Indian Reservation on the Utah/Arizona border; the state line passes through the most famous landmarks. The earliest people to mark the area were the Anasazi, or Ancestral Puebloans, who settled in around 1200 BCE. Their art and building structures remain. The Navajo culture took root centuries before Spaniards entered the area in 1581, and 250,000 of their descendants still live on the 16-million-acre Navajo Nation.

HDR and blend on sky for the Western Mitten photo 1 & 2