Monument Valley, on Navajo tribal land in the Arizona corner of the Four Corners region, was used as the backdrop for a number of movie and TV westerns. Some of those were in the black & white era. And that means the Phot-o' the Day is Monument Valley in awesome artsy black & white.
Visited April 1998.
Monument Valley, in the Arizona section of the Four Corners region, is one of the iconic sights of the American Southwest. Its name comes from the fact that so many large rock formation jut straight up like a bunch of tombstones.
There are no hiking trails here -- there is no shade, there are no "facilities," there is no water -- so take in the majesty of the park you drive. The roads within the park -- one of the "main" ones is in the foreground -- are not paved, but the land is so dry and the ground is so hard that it really is the same as if you were driving on asphalt, but without the distracting ribbons of black asphalt detracting from the terra cotta red of the rocks. I guess that's why so many "new model" automobile photo shoots were done here. It definitely would explain why this used to be a filming location for the old Hollywood westerns of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and, really, up until the time that the mountains of Italy and western Spain would play the part of the Desert Southwestern USA in those hipster spaghetti and gazpacho westerns of the 1960s.
Visited April 1998.
