Saturday, October 29th: Monument Valley

Jan on our morning walk. Our trailer is the white spec on the right.

Looking back at our trailer from the canyon rim finger

We got up to a chilly, but clear morning and decided to take a walk down the dirt road that leads out to a narrow finger of the canyon rim. In one place, the finger was only about 100 feet wide with 1000 foot cliffs on both sides. The mesa was perfectly flat with different little desert sage plants scattered everywhere. We could look back at our trailer parked on the canyon rim and it looked like a child’s toy. When we got to the end of the finger, we could see the river winding down below in a steep gorge. Other gorges feed into the serpentine canyon, but they were dry now as the rainy season had ended. One of the feeder streams looked like it had a nice waterfall as a hard layer of what looked like slate kept the water from digging further down into the gorge. As we walked back to the trailer, we stopped by John’s campsite and asked him about his neighbor with the generator. Apparently, it ran all night. I invited him to over to our trailer for some star gazing thru my 14” telescope that night.

The Mexican Hat rock

Some of the rock formations in Monument Valley

We hopped into the truck and headed to the town of Mexican Hat and onto Monument Valley, which was a 30 to 40 minute drive. Mexican Hat is famous for a rock that looks like a Mexican sombrero that precariously teeters on top of a rock column. Before we entered the town, we could see the rock about ½ mile away on our right. We needed some groceries, but the town didn’t seem to have a grocery store per sie so we drove on to Monument Valley. From the top of Monument Pass looking west, there is a famous picture of the highway leading down to the valley floor and out to the majestic rock formations. I always wanted to be in that spot and I finally was. The monuments were large, but they were very far apart and we couldn’t get close to most of them as the surrounding land was privately owned by the Navajo Indian Nation reservation. We noticed that there was a grocery store nearby the road junction, so we stopped to buy some groceries. We were a little disappointed; however, because they didn’t have our favorite sugar free fudgesicles, in fact, I don’t think there are any sugar free fudgesicles in all of southern Utah!

Jan in Monument Valley

When we got back, we started setting up the big telescope for the night’s viewing. Clouds had rolled in, but they passed over as the night got darker. The moon was a thin crescent and the planet Mercury could be seen on the horizon. What is so great about the desert is that the horizon is unobstructed in every direction and at this place the sky is dark in every direction as you are out in the middle of nowhere. As it got darker, I looked at the planet Jupiter and then some of my favorites: the Andromeda Galaxy and its companion galaxies, The Great Globular cluster in Hercules, the globular cluster M22 in Sagittarius, the Ring Nebula, and the Dumbbell Nebula. John dropped by, and we looked again at Jupiter, then again at Andromeda, and finally the seven sisters. With the sky that dark, we could just make out the Andromeda Galaxy with our naked eyes. Imagine seeing something 2.2 light years away with just your eyes! It was getting cold, so John left and we retired for the night.