Navajo & Hopi Country
The Colorado Plateau's tribal heart — Monument Valley and Canyon de Chelly, the Hopi mesas, Lake Powell and Antelope Canyon, and the banded ground of the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest, across the homelands of the Diné and Hopi.
This is the one region where the land belongs, in law and in fact, to the people who have always held it. The Navajo Nation is the largest reservation in the country, spilling across three states from a capital at Window Rock, and the Hopi mesas sit entirely within it — twelve villages on three fingers of rock, Old Oraibi among the oldest continuously inhabited places in North America. Diné means the people; Hopi carries the sense of the peaceful, the well-behaved. Read the country in their terms first, because the alternative is the tourist's terms, and the tourist is usually wrong.
The scenery you already know from a hundred films is theirs. Monument Valley — the sandstone towers John Ford turned into the backdrop of the American Western — is a Navajo tribal park, and its buttes were never anyone's frontier. Canyon de Chelly, farther east, has been lived in for five thousand years; its cliff dwellings and cottonwoods sit on a canyon floor no visitor may enter without a Diné guide. It is also where the worst of it happened. In the winter of 1864 Kit Carson burned the orchards and starved the people out, and some eight thousand Navajo were marched three hundred miles east to the prison camp at Bosque Redondo — the Long Walk, remembered as the central wound of the nation. Thousands died before the survivors were let home in 1868. Manuelito's band never surrendered at all; the ones who held out in Monument Valley say, still, that they conquered the United States.
The rest is Triassic and stranger. The banded badlands of the Painted Desert run out to the fallen logs of the Petrified Forest — jasper and agate where two-hundred-million-year-old trees used to be. Antelope Canyon carves light down through the Navajo sandstone near Page, above the drowned red rock of Lake Powell. Come for the buttes. Understand whose they are.
What to See in Navajo & Hopi Country
8 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Geology & Rock Formations
Natural Areas
Historic Sites
Towns & Gateways
Scenic Drives through Navajo & Hopi Country
Stories from Navajo & Hopi Country
Navajo & Hopi Country rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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