Monument Valley is the picture the world uses for the American West: red sandstone towers standing off a flat desert floor on the Arizona–Utah border, on Navajo land. The famous pair are the Mittens, two buttes each with a thumb of rock standing off the hand. From the View Hotel terrace you get both of them and Merrick Butte in a single sweep, and the sun comes up in the gap between them. Every tower here is a mesa caught mid-collapse. The edges crumble and the shape steps down: a mesa narrows to a butte, a butte to a spire, and a spire to nothing. The valley keeps all the stages standing side by side. The rough Valley Drive loops beneath the Mittens and Merrick to John Ford's Point, the spur the director set his cameras on, where a Navajo rider often waits with his horse.
The Wildcat Trail is the one walk you can take without a guide: six kilometres down onto the floor and around West Mitten. Out on the soft red sand, with the tower turning slowly above you, the rock stops being a backdrop. Most of the valley is closed to you without a Navajo guide, and that is where the rest of it is: the arches and cliff dwellings of Mystery Valley, petroglyphs, the overlook at Hunts Mesa. This is the Navajo Nation's own tribal park, not a national one, and families live and graze among the buttes. The valley is read as one enormous hogan, the traditional round home, with the northern pinnacles of Gray Whiskers and Sentinel Mesa for door posts. The floor closes at dark, and after that it belongs to the people who live on it. None of it would be famous but for a trader named Harry Goulding, who drove to California in the Depression with photographs of these buttes, hoping a film crew would bring the Navajo paid work. John Ford came, and came back six times.