Monument Valley

The flaming red buttes and mesas of the Navajo Tribal Park puncture the desert plateau of the Utah-Arizona border like a city in the sand, rising up from an otherwise empty horizon and visible for some twenty miles around.  These immense bodies of rock soar up to 1,000 feet into the sky and stand alone, isolated from each other as if scattered from space into a once featureless landscape.  Like peak-less mountains, their summits lie as flat as the desert on which they sit.  At their sides, impossibly balanced spires of sandstone stand on crumbling pedestals of boulders atop sweeping banks of shingle, casting long slender fingers of light and shade across the valley floor.  A copper coloured dust hangs in the air over the narrow dirt road which navigates the alien-like formations.  Along this road, very slowly, we drove, our necks cranked backwards, the pair of us gazing up in awe at the giants looking down upon us.