The Totem Pole is a slender rock spire in Monument Valley on the Navajo Nation, formed from De Chelly and Wingate sandstones deposited about 260 million years ago near the end of the Permian period. Erosion over immense spans of time carved the valley’s mesas, buttes, and isolated pinnacles, leaving this tower beside the Yei Bi Chei as one of the landscape’s most striking features. Visible from Valley Drive, it became widely known through climbing and film. Bill Feuerer, Jerry Gallwas, Mark Powell, and Don Wilson first climbed it on June 11–13, 1957, and it later appeared in Clint Eastwood’s 1975 film The Eiger Sanction.