MEXICAN HAT, Utah — There’s a rugged patch of southern Utah that’s so far off the well-trodden path that many travelers find it only by mistake. This slice of the state is vast and sprawling, a broken-down, red-rock landscape of arroyos and buttes and mile after mile of mile after mile. But even in this terrain, the Valley of the Gods is deliciously remote, so far gone that not even cell phones catch a signal.
It could perhaps even be described as terrifyingly remote if you’re driving south along Utah 261, known locally as the Trail of the Ancients, to reach the valley as I did one early spring day. Just as I was beginning to savor the expansive, multi-hued panorama of sun-burnt sandstone that filled my windshield, I was forced to tap dance with my Outback’s brake pedal.
Blocking my access to the valley was a 1,100-foot descent from the rim of Cedar Mesa via the “Moki Dugway,” a three-mile-long dirt and gravel washboard generously referred to by locals as a road. Blasted and chiseled into the mesa’s flanks during the uranium boom of the 1950s to accommodate ore trucks
shuttling back and forth to a mill in nearby Mexican Hat, the 11 percent grade catches your breath, rattles your nerves and strains your brakes.
The prudent, I was later told, avoid it in wet weather. Fortunately, this day was talc-powder dry and the air clear — so clear, in fact, that it seemed
to magnify the buttes, minarets and towering umber and ocher blades of sandstone that rise from the belly of the Valley of the Gods.
To generations of Navajo this place has been sacred ground, filled with the spirits of warriors turned to stone. Novelists Zane Grey and Edward Abbey
felt the valley’s power and inserted the setting into some of their works. Abbey, who once described the landscape’s rock as being “the color of rusted
iron,” even sent one of his own warriors from The Monkey Wrench Gang, George Washington Hayduke III, into the valley to flee a pursuing posse.
What sent me to the Valley of the Gods was not flight, but rather a search for solitude. Were it not for the well-known and well-publicized Monument
Valley, which lies a half-hour’s drive south, just across the Utah-Arizona border, the Valley of the Gods surely would lure crowds to see rocky sentinels
dubbed Battleship Rock, Setting Hen, Lady in a Tub, Castle Butte and De Gaulle and His Troops. But Monument Valley is nearby and Valley of the Gods is but a tenth the size.
“I was shocked. I was really shocked going through it. I didn’t even know it was here,” Jim Cullen told me one morning over breakfast at the Valley of
the Gods Bed and Breakfast.
Cullen and his wife had headed west from New York City to see Monument Valley and settled on a night at the B and B by fluke, having found the inn
while surfing the Internet. At the time, they didn’t realize the B and B came complete with a valley of its own. “It was enjoyable,” Cullen said of Monument Valley, “but you had seen it so many times in a book or a magazine. It didn’t amaze you like this place did.”
Debbie Cullen agreed. “You felt like you couldn’t get into (Monument Valley). Here, you feel like you were really there,” she said.
Only one road cuts through Valley of the Gods. It’s a dusty lane that twists, turns, dips and rolls for 17 miles, running through dry washes that funnel floods during gully washers, leading past a dozen or so significant formations and countless minor ones. Here and there spokes of red dirt dart from the main road to camp sites. One, not far from De Gaulle, I choose for my tent.
Before dinner, I scrambled up slopes of boulders and talus to a perch on the shoulder of Castle Butte. Below me the valley sprawled, with Battleship
Rock, Franklin Butte, Rooster Butte and other formations blazing in the sunset. Behind me, Rudolph and Santa Claus jutted into the valley.
These constellations of rock, stained by heavy concentrations of hematite and limonite, are waning fragments of Cedar Mesa that erosion has yet to
topple. Created when the mesa’s edge was fractured and eroded by water and ice, the spires one day will collapse to the valley floor, only to be replaced by new ones.
Some of the valley’s beauty can be missed if you don’t park your car and search for it. In spring, particularly after a winter such as this past one
that was heavy with rain and high-country snows, cataracts spill out of Cedar Mesa. Orange and red Indian paintbrush, deep purple Scorpion weed and delicate white petals of evening primrose dapple the valley floor. By June, yucca stalks four feet above the ground flower will splash shafts of yellow against the
valley’s russet underbelly.
For those who prefer not to sleep beneath the stars, there’s Claire and Gary Dorgan’s bed and breakfast. Once a ranch house that was homesteaded in
1933, the B and B rises above the valley floor on thick, handsome limestone blocks that were quarried nearby and carefully stacked to form stout walls. Heavy timbers support the roof. Solar panels that feast on the Southwest’s blazing sun generate electricity, while a nearly 3,000-gallon cistern that Gary fills in
summer with water trucked about eight miles from Mexican Hat fills the faucets and shower heads. Guests gaze into the valley from the B and B’s
75-foot-long covered porch, complete with rocking chairs, bleached cattle skulls and rusted wagon wheels.
One night during my stay, to thwart the evening chill, Gary coaxed the living room’s fireplace to life, while the flickers of well-placed oil lamps punched holes in the dark. It was a Zane Grey setting, one that appeals to the many European guests who “grew up reading about the Southwest, cowboys and Indians,” Gary said as he poked and prodded the hissing fire.
A good many other guests stumble upon the Dorgans’ comforting way station in the midst of going from here to there. “They’re really discovering us by accident on the way to bigger attractions. Canyonlands, Arches, the Grand Canyon,” Gary said.
But the Valley of the Gods has something they don’t — no crowds to get in the way.
Copyright Kurt Repanshek 2005
