Monument Valley starred in many movies

I thought I knew Monument Valley. I’d seen the westerns John Ford shot here, as well as the Isuzu car commercials. I’d read the books and devoured the documentaries. I knew that John Wayne had referred to this remote region of Navajo country straddling the Arizona-Utah border as the place “where God put the West.”

So what would be the purpose of coming here?

More than that, I worried that the experience might be anti-climactic. What if, like many major stars, it was less impressive in person than on the big screen, a landscape that looked empty and bereft without Hollywood’s effortlessly mythologized cavalry riding purposefully across it?

What if I wished I’d stayed home?

The man behind my dilemma was, of course, Ford. He shot only seven movies here, but the shadow they cast is long and persuasive.

The argument could be made that, from 1939’s “Stagecoach” through “Cheyenne Autumn” in 1964, those magnificent seven (which include “My Darling Clementine,” “Fort Apache,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” “The Searchers” and “Sergeant Rutledge”) created the 20th century’s image of the heroic, romantic West, showing us what it ought to look like, though it so rarely does.

To see Ford’s Monument Valley westerns is to see scenery – what one guide vividly describes as “great mesas, buttes, sandstone pinnacles, spires, fins and arches, all monuments to 500 million years of giant earth uplifts and the perpetual forces of erosion” – not merely photographed, but raised to the level of iconography.

Not only are these cinematic landscapes magical in and of themselves, but they also simultaneously dwarf and exalt the men who occupy them. They raise the actors who inhabit this space – Wayne being the most notable – to heroic status simply for being as casually at home in this matchless terrain as the Greek gods were on Mount Olympus.

Go to Monument Valley? Hadn’t I already been here?

No, as it turned out, I had not.

Monument Valley in person surprised me not once, but two times over. Like the canals of Venice or the Zen garden at Ryoan-ji temple in Kyoto, it is a place that insists on being seen in the round to truly be appreciated, the one Hollywood star that is unmistakably bigger than life.

My wife, Patty, and I decided that the time had come to visit this celebrated locale in person. I soon remembered one reason I had stayed away so long. Whether you fly into Phoenix or Albuquerque, N.M., Monument Valley remains a six-hour drive.

Those distances define one of the paradoxes of Monument Valley. Despite its pedigree and its knockout beauty, it gets relatively few tourists: 500,000 a year, compared with the estimated 5 million for nearby Grand Canyon. And most of those who do come are from overseas. Top honors go to German tourists, followed in numerical order by the French, Japanese and Italians before Americans appear on the visitor list.

Once we passed through Kayenta, Ariz., and the only-in-America Burger King that doubles as a museum dedicated to the celebrated Navajo code talkers of World War II, we turned off on U.S. 163. Almost immediately, there was a glimpse of El Capitan, a tall, otherworldly volcanic formation. I had the unshakable feeling that our six-hour drive somehow had deposited us on another planet.

If you want a hotel room in Monument Valley itself, there is only one place to stay: Goulding’s Lodge, a low-slung, 62-room establishment nestled comfortably at the foot of the massive Big Rock Door Mesa, just across the state line in Utah. Even if there were other places to choose from, Goulding’s would be the destination of choice. It is the Vatican City of western films, the place where memory resides, an establishment whose story is inextricably linked with the valley’s relationship with the movie business.

Though the Ford cast and crew members who stayed here and the Gouldings are long gone (brothers Gerald and Roland LaFont own the establishment now), the lodge and each room, complete with small balcony and orange plastic chairs to complement the red sandstone mesa, continue to offer the spectacular views that attracted Hollywood years ago.

In 1954, Time magazine called Goulding’s, when it had only eight rooms to its name, “one of the eight most luxurious hotels in the world.” The lodge is bigger now; in fact, it’s an entire mini-city warmly dedicated to the worship of the cinematic West. The front desk rents John Ford DVDs; a small theater shows one every night. The bookstore offers a range of wares: Pendleton blankets, Tony Hillerman novels, even a Navajo dictionary. The Stagecoach restaurant serves “hearty meals just like the Duke loved,” including various cuts of steak and ample portions of Navajo fry bread.

The highlight of a visit to Goulding’s is the original trading post, which looks just like it did when it appeared in “Fort Apache” in 1948. Now a museum, it features memorabilia, the swinging saloon doors from “My Darling Clementine” as well as pages from Goulding’s celebrated guestbook, in which Wayne poignantly wrote in 1945, “Harry, you and I both owe these monuments a lot.”

As fascinating as Goulding’s and the museum are, they are finally not enough, and as tired as we were from driving, we returned to the car and drove the couple of miles across the state line from Utah to Arizona to the visitors center of the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park.

The visitors center (which charges a $5-per-vehicle entrance fee) includes a museum of Navajo accomplishments, a large and well-stocked souvenir store with a fine selection of Navajo jewelry and rugs, and the View, a small restaurant that couldn’t be more appropriately named.

The buttes and mesas of the valley, as imposing as visitors from another galaxy yet delicate and romantic, are always ready for their close-up. In fact, one of the surprises of Monument Valley is that appreciation or even knowledge of Ford’s westerns isn’t necessary to fall in love with being here.

Several companies offer tours of the valley. Since we were already staying at Goulding’s, we booked one of the half-day tours. Twenty people filled up what looked like a converted school bus placed on the bed of a pickup truck and headed out for a closer look at Mitchell, Merrick, The Mittens, Grey Whiskers, King on His Throne, John Wayne’s Boot and the other eclectically named monuments.

Because the valley is on reservation land, all tours are guided by Navajos. Tour buses are the only vehicles allowed to explore the valley’s back country, stopping at natural arches and ancient Anasazi petroglyphs and offering glimpses, including an incongruous basketball hoop, of places where people make their homes.

All tours stop at John Ford Point, the director’s favorite camera location, the place where numerous cavalry charges and Indian attacks were committed to film.

The next day, we decided to see the area from another angle – riding in a Jeep Wrangler. This customized tour cost $185, but it offered an opportunity to go places we couldn’t otherwise reach and see the area from another point of view.

We cast our lot with Sacred Monument Tours. When we told our guide David Lee Clark (“a good Indian name,” he joked) what we already had seen, he suggested a drive around Mystery Valley, an area just south of Monument Valley that is not open to tour buses. It was a revelation, a completely different world just next door.

Clark was a thoughtful, laconic man with a dry sense of humor and a store of information about the history of the area and the properties of its plants. He piloted the four-wheel-drive vehicle over roads that were either barely there or completely nonexistent. We drove to rock formations that looked uncannily like flying saucers and to Mystery Valley’s most celebrated attraction, its numerous Anasazi ruins.

We drove back to Monument Valley across a seemingly trackless landscape in the growing twilight, the sun setting gorgeously behind the buttes.

“When I was growing up, the sun came up, the sun went down, I never noticed,” Clark said, speaking about the valley. A group of horses materialized like magic near us and then disappeared. “When I started doing tours, I started noticing.”

I knew just what he meant.

Seeing Monument Valley

Fly nonstop to Phoenix on United, America West or Southwest and drive about 300 miles to Monument Valley on U.S. 160 and 163.