A Monumental Christmas

22nd – 27th Dec

Monument Valley. It is not hard to see how it got its name. The Monuments, or buttes, seem to rise up from the flat valley floor like a motley band of giants, overseeing the craziness of man. Man in car. Man in camper van. Man filming movies. Man taking photos. This is one of the most iconic landscapes on the planet, a place to see, to be in. A place to spend our first ever Christmas À Deux. Of course, the buttes don’t rise up. They are just the last bits of a prehistoric plateau to crumble away. The whole place is actually disintegrating and one could wonder what the chances are of being crushed by a massive slice of rock falling from a butte face. Epitaph writing would be easy. ‘Her monumental butt was kicked by a Monumental Butte’. But I digress.

As I told you previously, we headed here a day earlier than planned, on a gorgeous late afternoon with the low winter sun lighting up the Monuments which glowed pink, leaving Arizona and entering Utah just as they started to come into view. The options for camping at this time of year are limited, and we were booked into a place called Gouldings. This is named after a Harry and his wife, ‘Mike’ Goulding, an intrepid couple who started a trading post in the 1920s. This has grown into a sprawling business including a motel, cottages, restaurant, gift shop, museum, petrol station, laundrette, grocery store and our RV park. Despite a small flurry of increased visitors over the holiday week, this is a very quiet time of year and we were easily accommodated a day early. In fact, we had our pick of sites and so chose the site at the very front of the park with an unobstructed view of the Monuments, a big space with a fire pit and a handy tree for the Christmas lights.

Due to desert dryness, and being in town parks, there had been fire restrictions in most places we had been this year, our last fire having been in Pigeon forge, 11 weeks ago. We were very excited at the prospect of more camp fires here and bought up a significant portion of the camp shop’s wood supply. After the small stresses of the day, our first evening was a blissful combination of the amazing view, beautiful sunset, full-moon rise and a few hours sitting around the fire, under our tree bedecked with red fairy lights, on a cold crisp evening in a deserted campsite.

The Gouldings complex sits at the edge of the Valley with its back to two large buttes, the RV campsite being about half a mile up the road that cuts up between them. Everything looks at ‘that view’. We wandered down the hill on the first day for a fossick around. We visited the small museum and large gift shop and checked out the restaurant for dinner that evening. We got some idea of how busy this place can get in peak season given the amount of accomodation, the number of campsites and the number of tables in the restaurant. Bananas. On the way home we called into the grocery store which was surprisingly well stocked, with one notable exception. Booze. All this area is still Navajo Nation land, so dry. Alcohol-free beer and wine is available in the restaurants and grocery stores, but there is no alcohol to be bought. (We had known this before we arrived and were prepared. The back seats of Big Dave were mostly given over to our stocks of beer, with the odd bottle of fizz, vodka, rum and whisky thrown in for Christmas cheer. Monument Valley, BYO). We walked back up the hill and hung out for a few hours, and then walked back down again for dinner. The cold evening met its perfect antidote in the form of two bowls of hot chilli served with the gloriousness that is Navajo fry bread. A frisbee-sized disc of oily naughtiness. After dinner we went over to another of Gouldings offerings, a small movie theatre that has nightly shows of old John Wayne movies that were filmed here. Monument Valley has been used as a backdrop in many movies, of which five starred John Wayne. We were treated to the 1939 movie ‘Stagecoach’, directed by John Ford, a man who directed so many movies out here that he has an area of the park named after him.

The next day we explored a few of the trails around the area. One of these was up to a small arch behind camp, and another was round the base of one of the nearby buttes giving us a much wider view of the Monuments.

On this second trail we also unexpectedly had more of a view than we really needed of a romantic tryst between a local native couple. Unnoticed, we backtracked and sat on a rock out of sight for ten minutes awaiting finalisation of events. They then left in different directions, with a stagger of a few minutes. How clandestine! We finished our walk with no more voyeuristic episodes and popped into the store for a few last minute provisions for Christmas dinner. In a fit of domestic goddessness, I made cranberry sauce and a loaf of bread in the afternoon and as dusk approached we lit the campfire again and had our first games of ‘weasel bag’ (aka corn hole) of this trip. Hampson kicked my butte.

And so to Christmas Day! The morning consisted of a hearty cooked breakfast, a gallon of coffee and opening our presents to each other. The offerings were a combination of frivolous and useful things to aid entertainment and staying warm. I got a book of poetry by Neruda, called Ode To Common Things. Here is a passage from a poem entitled ‘Ode To The Cat’:

‘There was something wrong/ with the animals:/ their tails were too long, and they had/ unfortunate heads./ They started coming together,/ little by little/ fitting together to make a landscape,/ developing birthmarks, grace, pep./ But the cat,/ only the cat,/ turned out finished,/ and proud:/ born in a state of total completion,/ it sticks to itself and knows exactly what it wants.’ -Neruda.

After all the excitement of all the unwrapping, we made very small piles of our gifts, wrapped up warm and set off for another walk. This was up a short canyon and took us close up to some very impressive rock faces. After building the obligatory inukshuk (apologies to the Inuit),

we wandered home and spent an hour or so sharing drinks and nibbles with our neighbours before, unfortunately, it started to rain.

This sent us all scurrying back inside our respective Tin Cans where we had our fairly traditional Christmas dinner: a tiny chicken each, draped in bacon, stuffed, with roasties, brussell sprouts and gravy, with, of course, homemade cranberry sauce. Yum. We ate too much to eat dessert. Just as dusk fell, the rain stopped, giving us a moody view of the monuments, and we managed to squeeze in another fire.

Hoorah! To cap it all off, we found Love Actually on TV in the evening. All in all, it was a lovely, low key Christmas Day. A wintery Christmas after many Southern hemisphere years. We had managed to speak to all the UK and Australian families and went to bed happy.

Boxing Day saw most of the other campers in the park move on, leaving us in almost an empty park. We did some festive laundry, did another short walk and yes, had another campfire. It is a kind of obsession. The next day we headed off. We had spent 5 mostly gloriously sunny days gazing at the Monuments from afar, and when it came to the prospect of driving the park loop road to get up close and personal to them, we decided that we didn’t need to do this. Somehow it was going to change how we saw them. So we stayed at a distance, and headed northwards. Our next stop, a small settlement called Bluff, just 40 or so miles away.