Into the Desert

Driving through Arizona, note the rock formations in the window

After our brief stop at the WalMart in Flagstaff we headed for Monument Valley in the northwest of Arizona along the Utah border. On the way we stopped at the Cameron Trading Post and had lunch as well as acquiring some souvenirs. I was in this area a number of times as a girl in the 1950's and there were few things here but the Cameron Trading Post was here even then. It has grown and has an excellent restaurant now but it has the same basic feeling to it and that is good.

It took most of the day to get to the Monument Valley area so we went straight to the RV park, the campground at Gouldings Lodge, just six miles from the Monument Valley Center. This campground is up in a canyon, above where the lodge and other buildings are that are part of the complex. Just driving to and being at this campground passes a lot of interesting rock formations and views.

In the morning we headed for the Monument Valley Center. This center wasn't even here when I was young although there were a few simple jeep tours available, basically you just got to drive through the area. Probably the most famous and well known formations are the East and West Mittens seen in the image at the left. As a girl of about eleven or twelve I remember coming through the valley in the middle of the night and my mother pulled over and shut the lights off on the car and we saw the monuments by moonlight, including the mittens. This isn't possible these days, too much traffic and too many people around for it to be that dark and quiet.

my little lizard friend

Of course I added to our souvenir collection ... I suppose eventually I should take a photo of them all but not today, after all there is more to get. I tried taking a selfie at the center while waiting for Geoff but I won't inflict the results on you. Suffice it to say that I need more practice at selfies. We were going to have lunch at the center but it was too early so we headed on north back into Utah because we discovered that at the campground we had been just over the state line into Utah and had gone back into Arizona when we went to the center.

We drove up through Utah on roads that were one lane each way and sometimes a bit rough and were very glad to finally connect up to I-70 coming out of Colorado and headed west to meet up with I-15 going north. Before getting that far we stopped for the night at an RV park in Green River, Utah. I don't remember the name of it and it is not very memorable, neither good nor bad. The Green River itself was nice to see, mostly because the country we had been going through had been so dry.

We headed on the next day, a bit farther west on I-70 and then a short run over US50 to get to I-15 north bound rather than going southwest on I-70 and then back north on I-15 to pick up where we did get on at Scipio. Along the way in Utah we saw more strange rock formations but I think the one to the left is one of the strangest!!

At first we thought it must be a man made structure but when we got close enough it was clearly a natural formation. The far side of it, away from the direction of the photo is more stretched out and less like a bee hive (ignore the bug splats on the windshield, please).