Monument Valley

Monument Valley is a sacred Navajo landscape on the Arizona-Utah border within the Colorado Plateau, renowned for towering red sandstone buttes rising from a broad desert basin. Its floor and rock layers record ancient river deposits and mineral colors shaped into one of the plateau’s most distinctive erosional scenes. Famous formations such as the Mitten Buttes, Merrick Butte, and Totem Pole lie largely within Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, where visitors can travel through part of the valley. Since the 1930s, films especially John Ford’s Westerns made its scenery an enduring image of the American West, though uranium mining also affected part of the area in the mid-20th century.

Arizona · United States