Fall 2019

Monument Valley, AZ and UT.

Monument Valley is one stop while exploring the Four Corners area, where the state lines of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona meet. All along the journey, I imagine seeing faces, statues, and figurines along the crumbling cliff sides—some lining up like saints on cathedral walls in Europe, while giant monoliths stand tall like ancient cityscapes. Four Corners was once dominated by the Ancestral Puebloan culture (also called Anasazi) estimated to be from about 750-1300 A.D. Today, their remarkable cliffside ruins remain—many multistoried and extremely well preserved. They dot the rocky rims and boulder- strewn walls of area canyons, many now protected in national parks including Colorado’s sprawling Mesa Verde, Canyons of the Ancients andHovenweep; Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly and Navajo National Monument; and New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, among others. In Monument Valley, Holiday points to buttes known as King on His Throne and the pair with a semblance to hands, East Mitten and West Mitten. “Put your hands out and you’ll see the thumbs on the side,” he explains. And at Mitchell Mesa, the so-called Three Sisters spires look like the letter “W.” “We can see three Catholic nuns, and that's why we call them the Three Sisters.” The red-rock monoliths have served as backdrops

Four Corners Monument.

A THROWBACK TO THE WILD WEST Story and photos by Richard Varr I see faces in the rocks, seemingly chiseled out of the earthen-red sandstone walls of mesa tops eroded through the millennia. Streaks add shapes and shadows, creating expressions; protrusions jut out like fingers and limbs. I pass what looks like seagulls on a ledge, while other formations portray an Indian face, or an eagle with wings at its side. Rock spires cluster alongside buttes atop a wavy sea of sand dunes now brilliantly aglow, as the early morning sun illuminates one of the nation’s most vivid natural panoramas. “People visit from different countries and when they come to Navajo land, we share our language and culture. And we share our landscape,” says Navajo guide Larry Holiday while leading me on a tour through storied Monument Valley along the Arizona and Utah border. “And they take home what they see not by just taking pictures, but also by the images in their mind—the landscape, the colors, the sandstone, what our ancestors had left here.”

FOUR CORNERS

COAST TO COAST FALL MAGAZINE 2019

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