Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park - Arizona/Utah
Posted by: 
Big B Bob
N 36° 59.340 W 110° 05.178
12S E 581310 N 4094042
Quick Description: One of the most majestic and most photographed points on earth.
Location: Arizona, United States
Date Posted: 11/13/2009 8:15:03 AM
Waymark Code: WM7NCQ
Views: 3
Long Description:From Navajo Parks & Recreation website:
This great valley boasts sandstone masterpieces that tower at
heights of 400 to 1,000 feet. framed by scenic clouds casting
shadows that graciously roam the desert floor. The angle of the sun
accents these graceful formations, providing scenery that is simply
spellbinding.
The landscape overwhelms, not just by its beauty but also by its
size. The fragile pinnacles of rock are surrounded by miles of
mesas and buttes, shrubs, trees and windblown sand, all comprising
the magnificent colors of the valley. All of this harmoniously
combines to make Monument Valley a truly wondrous experience.
Before human existence, the Park was once a vast lowland basin.
For hundreds of millions of years, materials that eroded from the
early Rock Mountains deposited layer upon layer of sediments which
cemented a slow and gentle uplift generated by ceaseless pressure
from below the surface, elevating these horizontal strata quite
uniformly one to three miles above sea level. What was once a basin
became a plateau.
Natural forces of wind and water that eroded the land spent the
last 50 million years cutting in to and peeling away at the surface
of the plateau.
The simple wearing down of altering layers of soft and hard rock
slowly revealed the natural wonders of Monument Valley today.