Driving the 17 mile scenic loop drive in Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park.
Monument Valley (meaning valley of the rocks) is a region of the Colorado Plateau characterized by a cluster of sandstone buttes, the largest reaching 1,000 ft (300 m) above the valley floor.[1] It is located on the Utah-Arizona state line, near the Four Corners area. The valley is a sacred area that lies within the territory of the Navajo Nation Reservation, the Native American people of the area.
Monument Valley has been featured in many forms of media since the 1930s. Director John Ford used the location for a number of his Westerns; critic Keith Phipps wrote that "its five square miles [13 square kilometers] have defined what decades of moviegoers think of when they imagine the American West."
The area is part of the Colorado Plateau. The elevation of the valley floor ranges from 5,000 to 6,000 feet (1,500 to 1,800 m) above sea level. The floor is largely siltstone of the Cutler Group, or sand derived from it, deposited by the meandering rivers that carved the valley. The valley's vivid red color comes from iron oxide exposed in the weathered siltstone. The darker, blue-gray rocks in the valley get their color from manganese oxide.
The buttes are clearly stratified, with three principal layers. The lowest layer is the Organ Rock Shale, the middle is de Chelly Sandstone, and the top layer is the Moenkopi Formation capped by Shinarump Conglomerate. The valley includes large stone structures including the "Eye of the Sun".
Between 1945 and 1967, the southern extent of the Monument Upwarp was mined for uranium, which occurs in scattered areas of the Shinarump Conglomerate; vanadium and copper are associated with uranium in some deposits.[4]
Major formations include West and East Mitten Buttes, Merrick Butte, and Hunts
Mesa.
efore human existence, the Park was once a lowland basin. For hundreds of millions of years, materials that eroded from the early Rock Mountains deposited layer upon layer of sediment which cemented a slow and gentle uplift, generated by ceaseless pressure from below the surface, elevating these horizontal strata quite uniformly one to three miles above sea level. What was once a basin became a plateau.
Natural forces of wind and water that eroded the land spent the last 50 million years cutting into and peeling away at the surface of the plateau. The simple wearing down of altering layers of soft and hard rock slowly revealed the natural wonders of Monument Valley today.
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