North Arizona, Monument Valley,
mythical western landscapes
in Navajo country
From Bluff, the road runs along a desert plateau.
Ocher fills the space.
Level formations are like the ruins of castles or pillars-dungeons, yet not by the hand of man.
Monument Valley is not far away, under a clear sky that foreshadows the intense dry heat to come.
Colossal rocks (the mesas) make fortresses, improbable Crash of the Knights, sinister and fantastic bristles in the Tolkien way.
High and narrow rocky blades, fragile and high ridges like immense raised and eroded walls evoke in the distance a papal hand in blessing, a raised thumb, even… a raised middle finger.
All have a name, for tourists, after the one assigned to them by the Navajo. Useless and tedious to try to evoke them.
On the Arizona side,
on track (s) for Monument Valley
The copper cliffs, brown like tanned leather, almost polished seem to draw abstract bas-reliefs.
On the tracks of ocher sand, so fine that it penetrates the smallest gaps and fills the shoes, some superb natural arches suddenly appear, like " the ear of the wind ".
The site is so well known that a shooting location is engraved on a rock, from which the arch is framed in a too agreed way, between the branches of a dead (?) tree.
Standard framing for tourist lacking in imagination.
Elsewhere, it is the "sun's eye", the demonic eye of the sun, or further "arch moccasin" which would have the shape of an Indian shoe, or a powerful and deep double arch.
On a rock side, some petroglyphs, deer or long-horned antelopes.
Then here is a colossal natural crypt, pierced at its top by a perfect circular orifice. It is called the "Big Hogan".
On the wall, the sun projects its light through the orifice, a clear replica of it.
Inside this immense vertical half-shell, as high as the nave of a church, at the foot of the well-inclined rock, a guide who precedes us whistles a Navajo melody in his flute, for a contemplating Asian couple.
Ours invites us to take a seat - not very comfortable on the slope - then sings with talent a chanting in a nostalgic, incantatory tone, accompanied by its tambourine. Whose we will never know the meaning.
From the prominent plateau on which the Visitor Center is established, the tracks plunge, meander between the landforms, along short, bushy plateaus encased in cliffs where John Ford may have shot a cavalry charge or an Indian attack (one of the sites is named "John Ford's Point").
Without respite, they jerk, rebound, plunge into small defiles, reveal other backgrounds, other horizons, dark and gaunt ghostly profiles, pass in the cooler shade of very high cliffs.
Even dead trees, or others that seem to be dead, contribute to the dramaturgy of the setting.
Tortured by the wind, exposed to extreme temperatures, sometimes bleached like bones, the Bristlecone pines need very little, play dead, curl up on themselves.
They only have life for a few months in the spring, remain small and stunted, ... but live up to 5,000 years!
From time to time, on the place from a particular point of view, some Navajo shops, a dry toilet, a few drinks ... and a break.
Elsewhere, a demonstration hogan and a few nervous horses in a small enclosure ; for those who aren't chewed by the saddle and who know how to ride.
But the memory will be marked by the grandiose panoramas which have been the setting of the great westerns, even parodic ones, and which have probably inspired of the Cinemascope format, or those of comics with heroes of the 50s and 60s and still today of fantastic films or science fiction (the frame does match for that too).
On the Utah side,
Mike and Harry welcome us
Directly to the opposite of the Visitor Center located in the State of Arizona, 3 or 4 miles away from the 163, at the foot of an ocher cliff, here is a tiny village, in the State of Utah.
Here is the " Goulding Lodge ", become a kinf of Museum.
He celebrates the man who in the years 20-30 with his wife Leone, nicknamed "Mike", discovered the site and its splendours, and promoted it to producers of films in the western genre.
Photographed throughout their lifetime (here in 1937), the couple is the authentic archetype of the American couple in their modernity of that time : Goulding must have the very tall presence of Gary Cooper, and his wife the modern beauty, conquering and spicy ahead of her time.
An american story
Their story illustrates in short a life of adventure that turns out well.
Harry Goulding and his wife come here in the early 1920s looking for news business opportunities, he who is a sheep merchant.
The Monument Valley site is owned by part of the Païute Indian Reserve. When the reserve boundaries are changed, the Gouldings buy a large piece of land here and quickly create a Trading Post.
They trade with the Navajo, buy their handicrafts, which they barter for food and other goods.
After a few years (?) of living in tent, they end up building a solid house, today the Museum which can be visited.
The shock of the Great Depression of the 30s is terrible for the Navajo reserve.
Goulding has heard of a film production company looking for locations in the Greater Southwest.
He is certain that the benefits of cinema will be able to help the Navajo people.
Having left for Hollywood in California with their last $ 60, by chance and by dint of perseverance, they meet the already famous director John Ford in person, to whom they show photos they took of Monument Valley.
It was the immediate trigger : John Ford paid in advance the Gouldings and a few days later began filming "The Stagecoach" with John Wayne.
The famous site is still developing and the Goulding welcome thousands tourists from all over the world.
They retired in the 1960s in Arizona where Harry died in 1981.
Mike, returned here, spent his last days there and died in 1992.
Without paying too much attention, their house perched on a rocky plateau leaning against the steep cliff embraces the entire mythical panorama at a glance.
But the star returns here to the effigy of John Wayne, and his cabin, in fact the Goulding reserve of potatoes, carrots, onions, in which the actor never slept.
Set back, a narrow and long sloping asphalt runway, almost invisible in the immensity of the landscape, is that of the local aerodrome, for VIP visitors.
Not far a hyper air-conditioned "General Store" , all employees of which are Navajo, awaits customers.
Climbing the road which crosses the hamlet towards the rear, it is the Navajo village, made up of this sort of well-spaced mobile homes, from which sometimes a pick-up emerges, loaded with a few bales of hay, for the horses, over there.
For non-Navajo people, just at the foot of a brown cliff, a dapper church.
A few steps from one of those postal depot with letterboxes, but unstaffed, a spindly tree against a school will be our precarious shelter against the blazing sun, for our snack.