Monument Valley With Patsy the School Bus Driver
Trip Start
May 19, 2009
1
7
11
Trip End
Jun 06, 2009
Kayenta, Arizona
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Another beautiful, sunny day in the desert. We had a guided tour of Monument Valley on the Navajo Reservation today. Our guide for the day wore a red western style shirt with 'Patsy' embroidered on the pocket. She drove us around in an open sided canopy bus, very expertly, I might add. She told us later that she was a school bus driver during the winter, and just did the tours in the summer.
We started with a trail that she called 'Mystery Valley'. It was a very bumpy ride through some very muddy roads, but the scenery was exquisite. We were driving right into the mesas and buttes. Fantastic formations, beautiful colors and still more interesting archaeological sites. There were so many site that I can't keep them all straight - some were just pictograph sites, some were small cliff dwelling sites, and some were ground level ruins. They were all Anastasi sites, according to our guide, and all of them seemed to have scatters of pottery and lithics and corncobs below them. There was quite a variety of pottery: corrugated ware, and black on white and black on red. Of course, we all loved it - we spent so much time looking at the ground and photographing bits of pottery that our guide threatened to just do a drive by of all the sites with pottery from now on. I'll include some shots of the pottery.
Had lunch in the shade of a canyon wall - BBQ burgers with all the fixins that Patsy and another guide cooked up on the spot! Very good! Then we crossed the highway to Monument Valley - an area famous for it's use as a movie set: old classics like 'Stagecoach' & 'Fort Apache' & 'Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid' and more modern movies like 'City Slickers', Thelma & Louise', 'Back to the Future'. And a variety of commercials for cars and beer and IBM - even the Marlborough man. The landscape in Monument Valley was even more rugged and spectacular, with mesas and buttes fading off into the distance. I took way too many pictures! We also saw one more pictograph site before heading home. On the way home Patsy told us about some of the Navajo traditions and modern ways of life, and how the two interacted. She even sang a few Navajo songs.
Long day, but a great day!
