The Place Where God Put the West: Riding Monument Valley with Navajo Guides

You have seen Monument Valley a thousand times without ever going there. Those enormous red sandstone towers rising straight out of a flat desert floor are the backdrop of nearly every Western ever made, the image the whole world pictures when it hears the word "cowboy." What almost nobody realizes is that you can ride a horse right out among them, and that there is only one way to do it: with the Navajo, on whose land the whole valley sits.

This is the gentlest ride in the entire series, and I want to be honest about that up front. You are not going to gallop here. What you get instead is something you cannot get anywhere else on Earth.

The place: red towers on Navajo land

Monument Valley is not a national park. It is a Navajo Tribal Park, about 92,000 acres of high desert straddling the Utah and Arizona line, inside the Navajo Nation, which is the largest Native American reservation in the country at more than 27,000 square miles. The formations you have seen in the movies have names: the East and West Mitten Buttes, standing like a pair of hands with their thumbs turned up, and Merrick Butte beside them. The most famous overlook of all is John Ford's Point, where a lone rider on the cliff's edge has become the single most photographed image of the American West.

The movies really were filmed right here

In 1938 a local trader named Harry Goulding drove to Hollywood with a folder of photographs and talked the director John Ford into shooting a film out here. That film was Stagecoach, it came out in 1939, and it turned a B-list actor named John Wayne into a star and Monument Valley into a legend. Ford came back again and again, nine films in all, and Wayne made five of his Westerns here, from Stagecoach to The Searchers. Ford loved the place so much that it became known, forever after, as the place where God put the West. When you ride out onto that valley floor, you are riding through the actual scenery of the movies.

You can only ride it with a Navajo guide

Here is the part that makes this trip special rather than just scenic. The backcountry of Monument Valley is closed to cars and closed to visitors on their own. The only way past the overlooks and out among the buttes is with a Navajo guide, and that is exactly as it should be. The horseback outfits here are Diné family operations, some of them families who have lived in this valley for more than a hundred years, and your guide is not reading you a script. You are riding sacred ground with the people whose ground it is, hearing the stories and the history from someone who grew up in the shadow of these rocks.

What the ride is actually like

The horses are sure-footed and calm, so used to this ground that they pick their own way up and down the sandy ledges. A typical ride runs about two hours and loops out among five of the biggest formations, on a route you simply cannot reach by car, though half-day and full-day options exist if you want more. The pace is unhurried on purpose. This is a walk through some of the most dramatic scenery on the planet, with time to look up, not a race across it. If your picture of a great horseback trip is speed, this is the exception in the series. If it is standing your horse at the edge of John Ford's Point in the golden light of early morning, there is nothing else like it.

Who this is really for

This one is for everybody. It is genuinely all levels, and it may be the single most beginner-friendly ride in this whole series. Total first-timers do it, kids do it, and nervous riders do it, because the horses are so steady and the pace is so gentle. If you have always wanted to ride but never felt ready for a gallop across the steppe, this is where you start. It is about the place and the people far more than it is about your skill in the saddle.

You can ride here year-round, but spring and fall are the sweet spot. Summer on the desert floor is genuinely hot, and winter can be bitterly cold, though a dusting of snow on those red towers is one of the most beautiful things you will ever see. Sunrise and sunset are when the rock glows and the crowds thin, and I will aim you at the right light for your dates.

How we book it

Monument Valley riding is booked through the Navajo-owned outfits that hold the permits to guide out there, not a big tour company, and matching you to a good one, at the right time of day, is the part I handle. It also pairs beautifully with a larger Southwest trip, since you are within reach of the Grand Canyon, Sedona, and the whole red-rock country of southern Utah. Tell me when you want to go and who is coming, and I will build the ride into the trip.

If riding out among those red towers with a Navajo guide has been sitting on your list, email me or send me a DM and let's talk. And if you want to see how this one fits with the rest, the full series recap sorts every ride by skill level and dream.

Talk soon, Cindi