Hovenweep Castle, built by Ancestral Puebloan masons on the canyon rim in the 1200s, seen from below against a deep blue sky streaked with cirrus. Two towers stand at either side of the frame — the left one round-walled and stepping down in a broken parapet, the right one presenting a flat face and a squared corner — both laid up in coursed sandstone with small flat chinking stones packed into the joints and narrow square openings set high in the walls. A lower standing structure shows between them in the middle distance. A juniper leans in from the left, grey sagebrush covers the rocky rim across the foreground, and bare slickrock and broken red stone fill the bottom of the frame.
Mobilus In Mobili / CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Utah · Region

Monument Valley & the Trail of the Ancients

Utah's remote far southeast — Monument Valley, the San Juan River canyons, and the Ancestral Puebloan country of the Trail of the Ancients.

8 places to explore

This is the far corner — the deep southeast of Utah, where the state runs out at the Arizona line and the San Juan River, and the country empties into some of the most remote and least-crowded land in the Lower 48. It is high desert of red buttes, slickrock mesas, and Ancestral Puebloan ruins, much of it on the Navajo Nation and in the Bears Ears country, and it asks more of a traveler than the parks up north: longer drives, fewer services, and a slower, more deliberate pace. The reward is space, silence, and some of the most recognizable scenery on the planet.

The icon is Monument Valley, the cluster of sandstone buttes and spires rising off the desert floor along the Utah–Arizona border. It is a Navajo Tribal Park rather than a national park, run by the Navajo Nation, and its mesas and mittens have stood in for "the West" in so many films — beginning with John Ford's Westerns — that the place can feel like a memory before you arrive. A seventeen-mile dirt loop carries you down among the formations; nearby, Forrest Gump Point marks the spot on US-163 where the highway runs arrow-straight at the buttes.

The other half of the region is older. The "Trail of the Ancients" — the scenic byway the area is named for — threads together one of the densest concentrations of archaeology in the country. Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding preserves an Ancestral Puebloan great house and the largest collection of Ancestral Puebloan pottery in the Four Corners, and Natural Bridges National Monument protects three enormous stone bridges — and was the world's first certified International Dark Sky Park.

In between runs the San Juan River canyon country, and it is a road tripper's playground. Goosenecks State Park looks a thousand feet down on the river's tight, entrenched meanders; the Moki Dugway climbs the face of Cedar Mesa in a set of unpaved switchbacks; Valley of the Gods offers a free, empty loop among buttes that feels like Monument Valley with no one else around; and Mexican Hat Rock balances its improbable sombrero of stone above the highway.

Go in spring or fall — summers are punishing — fill the tank before you leave town, and give it time. This is the corner of Utah that rewards the traveler willing to drive the farthest.

What to See in Monument Valley & the Trail of the Ancients

8 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

The entrenched meanders of the San Juan River seen from the rim at Goosenecks State Park, the river doubling back on itself around long grey fins of layered rock a thousand feet below. Pale green water catches the light at the left, again in the centre and again at the right, each bend divided from the next by a narrow spine of banded shale and limestone stepping down in hundreds of thin ledges. Broken red slickrock and loose rubble fill the foreground at the edge of the overlook, and a heavy grey storm lies low across the whole canyon.

Goosenecks State Park

Mexican Hat

A 1,000-foot-deep river canyon with impossibly tight meanders

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Mexican Hat Rock in low evening sun — a broad flat disc of sandstone roughly sixty feet across, balanced on a narrow neck at the top of a small butte and reading exactly as a sombrero seen edge-on. The butte beneath it is banded orange and red in horizontal ledges and falls away into a long slope of red siltstone streaked with shadow and dotted with low brush. Dry pale grass fills the foreground, and banded grey and tan cliffs stand across the background in shadow.

Mexican Hat Rock

Mexican Hat

A perfectly balanced sombrero-shaped rock formation

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The Moki Dugway seen from high on the cliff — three tiers of unpaved switchback cut into the face of Cedar Mesa, the pale gravel road doubling back on itself across ledges of red sandstone with a low stone and earth berm along the outer edge and no guardrail anywhere on it. A light pickup runs one of the upper bends trailing a long plume of dust. Past the last turn the road straightens out across the tan desert floor eleven hundred feet below, a broad cliff-walled mesa stands to the right of it, and flat-topped buttes line the far horizon under high summer cumulus.

Moki Dugway

Mexican Hat

A heart-pounding series of switchbacks carved into a cliff face

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A scanned printed reproduction of the Mittens in Monument Valley at low sun. West Mitten Butte stands at the left, a broad red sandstone tower with a slender detached spire beside it, rising from a talus skirt above the stepped ledges of the valley floor; East Mitten Butte stands smaller and further off at the right with its own thin spire. Warm cloud streaks a pale blue and pink sky, and juniper and sage cover the foreground bench. The frame carries the fine dot screen of the printing it was scanned from.

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Mexican Hat

The most iconic Western landscape on Earth

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Owachomo Bridge at dusk in Natural Bridges National Monument — a thin ribbon of pale gold sandstone spanning the frame from left to right, narrowing to a slender strip at its centre and running into a massive rounded knob of rock at the right end, the rock mound the bridge is named for in Hopi. Open sky shows through the opening beneath it. In front and below, a slickrock drainage steps down toward the camera in shelves of grey and rose stone holding shallow pools of standing water, with juniper and low brush scattered across the slabs and a pale pink sky above the canyon rim.

Natural Bridges National Monument

Blanding

Three massive natural bridges carved by ancient streams

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The graded dirt road through Valley of the Gods running away from the camera across red sand and saltbush, its wheel tracks worn pale through the rust-coloured surface. A broad red butte stands close on the right, banded in ledges and capped with a row of eroded knobs and blocks; further off, low mesas and a slender detached spire stand along the left horizon. The sky is flat grey overcast with a thin band of cloud lying across the tops of the buttes, and there is no vehicle and no person anywhere in the frame.

Valley of the Gods

Mexican Hat

A free, uncrowded alternative to Monument Valley

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Historic Sites

Excavated Ancestral Puebloan masonry at the Edge of the Cedars pueblo in Blanding — a standing block of coursed sandstone at the left with a row of four small square openings set high in the wall and a dark doorway at its near corner, built of thin flat slabs laid in tight courses with chinking stones packed between them. Lower stabilised walls run away to the right across cropped green grass and red earth, fallen blocks and a slab-paved surface lie in the foreground, and a low blue ridge stands on the far horizon under a hard clear sky. The kiva and the ladder down into it are not in the frame.

Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum

Blanding

An Ancestral Puebloan ruin you can climb down into

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Roadside Stops

US-163 running dead away from the camera toward the Monument Valley skyline at first light, shot low from the middle of the road so the broken yellow centre line runs from the bottom of the frame to the vanishing point. The asphalt dips and lifts over two long swells; one car comes the other way with its headlights on and another is small in the distance, and a side road joins from the right at a pair of yellow signs. Red cut banks and sage flats spread either side, with a low roadside homestead and a water tank standing out on the right. Buttes and slender spires line the horizon on Diné land in flat rose and lilac light, under a pale pink sky.

Forrest Gump Point

Mexican Hat

The exact spot where Forrest stopped running

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Scenic Drives through Monument Valley & the Trail of the Ancients

Scenic Byway

U.S. 163: The Monument Valley Crossing

Sixty-eight miles up US-163 out of the Navajo Nation — from Kayenta and the Code Talkers past sacred Agathla and the buttes the world mistakes for the West, across the reservation's edge into Utah's free-roaming canyon country.

68 mi · 2 hrs

Stories from Monument Valley & the Trail of the Ancients

Nature

The Last of the Dark

Across the modern world the night sky has been all but erased by artificial light — most people will never see the Milky Way from home. The high, empty Colorado Plateau is the largest reservoir of real darkness left in the country, and Utah protects more of it than anywhere on Earth.

6 min read
Nature

The Skin of the Desert

The black, knobby crust between the rocks and shrubs of southern Utah is alive — a community of ancient organisms that quietly holds the whole landscape together. It can take a human lifetime to grow back, and it dies under a single boot.

6 min read

Monument Valley & the Trail of the Ancients rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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