Almost every article about Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park starts with a picture of the same two formations, so why break tradition. Unfortunately, we arrived late in the afternoon with only a little light left to take a few pictures and the nearest available hotel room was in Mexican Hat, Utah. (Pictures are from a trip taken several years ago.)
Monument Valley (Tse Bil' Ndzisgaii, meaning Valley of the Rocks in Navajo) is a collection of large sandstone buttes on the Navajo Nation Reservation that have been featured in many Western movies. Some of the buttes are about 1,000 feet tall.
To many people, they often think of Monument Valley when they think of the American West. The Navajo like to say that the Park looks today like it did 30 years ago, which is what it looked like 300 years ago, which is what it looked like 3,000 years ago. In other words, there is not a lot of change in the Park.
The vivid red color in the buttes comes from iron oxide and the darker blue-gray rocks get their color from manganese oxide. There are also mineable deposits of uranium, vanadium and copper in the soils.
An access fee is charged to drive the 17-mile dirt loop road in your private vehicle, but other parts of the Park are accessible only by guided tour. Tourist literature states that Monument Valley is "Big Rocks, Big Sky, and...nope. That's it."
Well, we finally learned the true meaning of "March Madness." The plumber came out to the house to fix the water softener, only to discover that we had a hot water leak under the house, Unfortunately, in Las Vegas houses are built on a slab, so repairing a leak requires cutting holes into the walls and rerouting the pipe above-ground. Fortunately, the plumbers only had to remove part of the wall between the laundry room and the downstairs bathroom to bypass the underground leak. Unfortunately, a few days after the walls were repaired, we discovered a second leak, which required re-plumbing the entire house! This time the plumbers cut 40 holes in the walls and ceilings in order to install all of the new pipes to bypass all of the underground pipes. It was while they had the water turned off, we discovered the true meaning or "running water" - it means running back and forth to the neighbors house with a 5 gallon bucket to get enough water so that you can flush a toilet. Since the painters were going to paint about half of the downstairs, we decided to just have them paint the entire downstairs part of the house. This has taken much longer than anticipated and they have still not finished texturing and painting, so all of the furniture is still stacked in the middle of the rooms covered with plastic. We decided that if we can survive this mess, we can probably survive anything.
We had intended to take a March trip to the Mojave Desert to photograph wild flowers, but after all of our plumbing fun, we decided to settle for a trip down to the Bellagio Conservatory to see the Spring 2018 arrangement.
