Monument Valley Tribal Park, Utah

You’ve seen it before. Our last stop in Utah is one of the most famous landscapes in the United States.

If you’re a John Wayne fan, you saw it in the 1939 film “Stagecoach”. If that was a little before your time, perhaps you saw it in “Easy Rider”, “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “Thelma and Louise”. What about “Forrest Gump?” Remember when Forrest suddenly stopped running? It was here.

Please click the images to view larger versions.

Not a movie fan? Maybe you saw it on some album covers from the Eagles, Led Zeppelin or Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Still before your time? How about video games like “Need for Speed” or “Motorstorm”?

Whatever your age, it’s pretty hard to miss the iconic Monument Valley.

Monument Valley is a Navajo Tribal Park which lies on the Utah-Arizona border. You can pay a fee to drive your car around a loop road on the Navajo reservation. I didn’t do that though. I cannot recall off hand how much it was, but it just seems odd to pay a fee to see something that I could already see. I remember thinking the same thing when we drove by the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota – “You know I can already see it, right?”

One thing I really liked about Monument Valley is that it is a great place to photograph in the late afternoon because the clouds are usually not there in the morning hours.

By the way, these are not the “unique” images I referred to in my last post – those are still to come! I am so excited to show what happened after I made these images.