Monument Valley
— — the buttes the westerns came for.
Not only on a wall.
“On the Arizona-Utah border, inside the Navajo Nation. Sandstone buttes (the Mittens, Merrick, Sentinel Mesa) rise straight up off the desert floor in deep iron-red, a thousand feet of cliff above a flat valley. John Ford filmed Stagecoach here in 1939 and the silhouette of the place has carried American Western cinema ever since. The seventeen-mile Valley Drive loops the formations from the visitor centre on the rim.
Monument Valley, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Monument Valley sits on the Colorado Plateau across the Arizona-Utah state line, entirely inside the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the United States by area. The valley floor lies at roughly 5,200 feet (1,585 metres) and the most prominent buttes (East and West Mitten, Merrick Butte, Sentinel Mesa) rise about 1,000 feet above it. The park is administered by the Navajo Nation as Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, established in 1958, with a visitor centre on the Utah rim at the head of the seventeen-mile Valley Drive.
The buttes are remnants of an ancient layer of sandstone (chiefly the de Chelly Sandstone of the Permian) that once covered the entire Colorado Plateau. Iron oxides in the rock give the cliffs their deep red, oxidising further toward the surface. Wind and the seasonal monsoon have stripped the softer rock around the harder cores; what stands today is the leftover, a process geologists estimate has taken roughly 50 million years. The same de Chelly Sandstone forms the walls of Canyon de Chelly to the south.
Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park is open daily, with hours that shift by season; the entrance fee in 2025 is roughly twenty dollars per vehicle for up to four people. The 17-mile Valley Drive is unpaved, rough in places, and passable in a standard passenger vehicle in dry weather. Navajo-guided tours from the visitor centre reach restricted areas off the public loop, including Mystery Valley and the inner canyons. The View Hotel, opened in 2008 on the canyon rim, is the only lodging inside the park itself.