Monument Valley

A region of the Colorado Plateau characterized by a cluster of sandstone buttes, the largest of them reaching 1,000 feet above a valley floor that itself lies between 5,000 and 6,000 feet. The most famous formations sit in northeastern Arizona along the Utah-Arizona state line, within the reservation of the Navajo Nation, who consider the valley sacred; the Navajo name means valley of the rocks. It has been featured in film since the 1930s, used repeatedly by the director John Ford, and the critic Keith Phipps wrote that its five square miles have defined what decades of moviegoers think of when they imagine the American West.