monument valley

Sunday 24 April
Monument Valley all day by Ian.
Somehow the light of breaking dawn rouses me at 5 again. But this time to step outside and see the buttes and mittens of monument valley. Stupendous and hard to grasp their scale – 1000 feet shear from the flat desert floor, with conical skirts of millennial rubble and all in the red of sandstone. The chill drives me in for clothes and camera. They do say ‘awesome’ a lot over here, but on this trip it is regularly appropriate! Walk about in the chill watching the sun struggle up behind the clouds – more rosy than fiery – and polyglot tourist-photographers with attitude and thousand dollar canons. There’s a mateship in it as I copy their stance and angles, though.
Breakfast includes biscuits (which are scones) and gravy (which is savoury white sauce). So Creamy sauce smothered scone translates into ‘biscuits with gravy – two nations separated by a common language again! They’re nicely down to earth about food in the Navaho nation... white or brown Gravy with your John Wayne chicken? And a side of blue corn mush? That’ll do nicely.

And by Cora

I start painting from the window in the morning, paint again in the afternoon – a way of trying to grasp what I’m seeing, and capture the ravishing kaleidoscope of changing colours that stretch away into the distant mountains like the sea. The landscape is shocking in its other-worldliness, more like being on another planet than anywhere I’ve been or can imagine. After the mind-stretching but soothing embrace of The Grand Canyon, here seems a harsh, raw, masculine beauty. No wonder Hollywood loved it. The Navajos describe it as the place where Mother Earth reaches up to Father Sky, but these great pillars seem almost not of the earth. The flat desert floor, flushed with green, melds with the constantly changing light from the soft, cloudy sky. The pillars seem red, jagged, angry. The beauty is of the light and shade, the moving clouds that drape them in the morning, the rainbows. And the textures of the rock faces, vast murals of natural rock art. We stop constantly on our drive around the valley, which isn’t a valley but a great plain, to gasp and marvel and like everyone else, take insane numbers of photos.