One of my favorite places on earth is Monument Valley in Utah near the Arizona boarder. The picture is of me a few years ago at "John Fords Points". Monument Valley was made famous by movie director John Ford who made a number of Westerns there some with John Wayne. My wife and kids stayed at Gouldings Lodge where John Ford stayed while making his movies and took a guided tour with a Navajo guide on the back of a four wheel drive truck. It was one of the best days of my life. Today there is a travel story from the Los Angles Times about a trip a staff writer took to Monument Valley. If you will click on the title above there is a link to the full travel story . His trip very much mirrors our trip. A few quotes from the Times story:
Monument Valley's star power
By Kenneth Turan , Times Staff Writer
Times Staff Writer
March 4, 2007
Monument Valley, Utah
I thought I knew Monument Valley. I'd seen the westerns John Ford shot here, as well as the Isuzu car commercials. I'd read the books and devoured the documentaries. I knew that John Wayne had referred to this remote region of Navajo country as the place "where God put the West."
So what would be the purpose of actually coming here?
More than that, I worried that the experience might be anti-climactic. What if, like many major stars, it was less impressive in person than on the big screen, a landscape that looked empty and bereft without Hollywood's effortlessly mythologized cavalry riding purposefully across it?
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What if, God forbid, I wished I'd stayed home?
The man behind my dilemma was, of course, Ford. He shot only seven movies here, but the shadow they cast is long and persuasive.
In fact, the argument could be made that, from 1939's "Stagecoach" through "Cheyenne Autumn" in 1964, those magnificent seven (which include "My Darling Clementine," "Fort Apache," "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," "The Searchers" and "Sergeant Rutledge") created the 20th century's image of the heroic, romantic West, showing us what it ought to look like, though it so rarely does.
To see Ford's Monument Valley westerns is to see scenery — what one guide vividly describes as "great mesas, buttes, sandstone pinnacles, spires, fins and arches, all monuments to 500 million years of giant earth uplifts and the perpetual forces of erosion" — not merely photographed but raised to the level of religious iconography.
Not only are these cinematic landscapes magical in and of themselves, but they also simultaneously dwarf and exalt the men who occupy them. They raise the actors who inhabit this space — John Wayne being the most notable — to heroic status simply for being as casually at home in this matchless terrain as the Greek gods were on Mt. Olympus.....
Despite its pedigree and its knockout beauty, it gets relatively few tourists: 500,000 a year compared with the estimated 5 million for nearby Grand Canyon. And most of those who do come are from overseas. Top honors go to German tourists, followed in numerical order by the French, Japanese and Italians before Americans appear on the visitor list......
If you want to get a hotel room in Monument Valley itself, there is only one place to stay: Goulding's Lodge, a low-slung, 62-room establishment nestled comfortably at the foot of the massive Big Rock Door Mesa, just across the state line in Utah. Even if there were other places to choose from, Goulding's would be the destination of choice. It is the Vatican City of western films, the place where memory resides, an establishment whose story is inextricably linked with the valley's relationship with the movie business.
Harry Goulding and his wife, Leone, arrived in the valley in 1923. The land then belonged to the Paiutes, not the Navajo, and when it became available for homesteading in 1928, the Gouldings, who initially lived in a tent, bought 640 acres for $320 and built a small trading post with living quarters on the second floor.
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The official one, which might even be true, has Goulding, hurt by the Depression and hearing that John Ford was looking to shoot a western on location, going to Los Angeles. Armed with a book of professionally shot photographs, he was determined to get Ford to work in the valley, which had previously been the site of a 1925 silent called "The Vanishing American."
Goulding may or may not have laid out his bedroll in the production offices and threatened to wait as long as necessary for a meeting, but Ford was persuaded to shoot "Stagecoach" here. He considered it "the most beautiful place on Earth" and visited the valley so often that he eventually acquired the Navajo name of Natani Nez (Tall Leader), and as a major enemy of studio interference, he was especially partial to the fact that no spot in the United States was farther from a railroad than this locale.
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Though the Ford cast and crew members who stayed here and the Gouldings are long gone (brothers Gerald and Roland LaFont, own the establishment now), the lodge and each room, complete with small balcony and orange plastic chairs to complement the red sandstone mesa, continue to offer the spectacular views that attracted Hollywood years ago and still inspire the kind of ecstatic, died-and-gone-to-heaven experience Ford himself must have had when he set eyes on this scenery....
(Gouldings)... it's an entire mini-city warmly dedicated to the worship of the cinematic West. The front desk rents John Ford DVDs; a small theater shows one of them every night. The bookstore offers a range of wares: Pendleton blankets, Tony Hillerman novels, even a Navajo dictionary with a CD pronunciation guide. The Stagecoach restaurant serves "hearty meals just like the Duke loved," including various cuts of steak and ample portions of Navajo fry bread.
The highlight of a visit to Goulding's is the original trading post, which looks just like it did when it appeared in "Fort Apache" in 1948. Now a museum, it features memorabilia, the swinging saloon doors from "My Darling Clementine" as well as pages from Goulding's celebrated guestbook, in which John Wayne poignantly wrote in 1945, "Harry, you and I both owe these monuments a lot.".....
The buttes and mesas of the valley, as imposing as visitors from another galaxy yet delicate and romantic, are always ready for their close-up. In fact, one of the surprises of Monument Valley is that appreciation or even knowledge of Ford's westerns isn't necessary to fall in love with being here. The reality is so thrilling that the films almost fly out of your head, leaving you with a feeling of pure elation. If ever a place cast a spell, rooted you to the ground and refused to let you leave, this is it........
Since we were already staying at Goulding's, we booked one of the half-day tours. Twenty people filled up what looked like a converted school bus placed on the bed of a pickup truck and headed out to get a closer look at Mitchell, Merrick, the Mittens, Grey Whiskers, King on His Throne, John Wayne's Boot and the other eclectically named monuments.
Because the valley is on reservation land, all tours are guided by Navajos. Tour buses are the only vehicles allowed to go off the 17-mile drive and explore the valley's back country, stopping at natural arches and ancient Anasazi petroglyphs and offering glimpses, including an incongruous basketball hoop, of places where people make their homes.
All tours stop at John Ford Point, the director's favorite camera location, the place where numerous cavalry charges and Indian attacks were committed to film.
The most remarkable thing about Mystery Valley, after spending time amid the motorized bustle of Monument Valley, was a silence so complete you felt you were listening to the sound of eternity as you looked at the ruins.
To be there alone is to go back in time and enter a kind of parallel universe, just as beautiful as the one the films made famous but more reserved, respectful and remote.
If you are a fan of John Ford and or John Wayne go to Monument Valley you will not be disappointed.I can still remember getting up before dawn so I could watch the sun come up over the valley. We watched in our room John Ford movies on VHS tape each night we were there and I had recorded some of the sound track to some of his movies to play as we drove into the valley.The museum in the trading post was fun and the little hut out back ( Which stood for John Wayne's quarters in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon") was great too!
