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    Monument Valley: Navajo Nation Natural Wonder
    Monument Valley: Navajo Nation Natural Wonder
    Monument Valley: Navajo Nation Natural Wonder
    Ebook128 pages33 minutes

    Monument Valley: Navajo Nation Natural Wonder

    By David Muench and Anne Markward

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    About this ebook

    Welcome to Monument Valley Tribal Park—a world of weather-carved rock and wind-driven sand, of massive buttes painted with dark desert varnish, of hardy plants clinging to the earth. At dawn and sunset, an ever-changing sky silhouettes the dark-looming monuments against washes of color from delicate to vibrant. Monument Valley’s Navajo residents live in harmony with this challenging, beautiful landscape.
    Dynamic forces of earth, wind, and water built and sculpted the dramatic forms of this land. The visible rock of Monument Valley—carved today into buttes, monoliths, and mesas—represents millions of years of contrasting land layers as ancient sands compressed over geologic time into rock. Then the vast Colorado Plateau uplifted, erosion cutting its softer surfaces back down, leaving pockets and markers of hard rock still standing. Grain by grain, wind and rain still carve the rock forms of Monument Valley.
    Ancestral Puebloans settled into the recessed rock alcoves dotting this region more than a thousand years ago. Only fragments of their lives—masonry dwellings, hand-formed pottery, rock art—remain. Many generations later, the Diné—the People—established a homeland in the red rock country and a community based on harmonious life between Mother Earth and Father Sky.
    Harry Goulding came to Monument Valley with his young wife, Mike, in 1924 to establish a trading post at the foot of Big Rock Door Mesa. They raised sheep, traded handwoven Navajo rugs for food and household items, and hosted an ever-growing number of curious visitors. During the difficult Depression years of the 1930s, the Gouldings attracted early moviemakers to Monument Valley. John Ford’s films created an entire generation of moviegoers’ views of the American West—and travelers from around the world have visited Monument Valley ever since. The Navajo Tribal Council established Monument Valley Tribal Park in 1958. Now this place of traditional lifestyle and spectacular scenery is preserved for its beauty as well as its ancestral and contemporary importance to the Navajo.
    Those who travel here find not only the rich history of this desert place, but a sense of Monument Valley’s special harmony as well. Let the rhythm of this land thrum through your soul; let the voice of its spirit call you home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGraphic Arts Books
    Release dateMay 26, 2015
    ISBN9780944197028
    Monument Valley: Navajo Nation Natural Wonder
    Author

    David Muench

    David Muench is an American landscape and nature photographer known for portraying the American western landscape. He is the primary photographer for more than fifty books and his work appears in many magazines, posters, and private collections.

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      Book preview

      Monument Valley - David Muench

      SLICKROCK RAIN POOL ON CEDAR MESA

      MONUMENT VALLEY DOUBLE EXPOSURE

      MONUMENT VALLEY

      NAVAJO NATION NATURAL WONDER

      BREAK OF DAWN

      Photography by David Muench

      Essay by Anne Markward

      DAYBREAK, MITTEN ROCK AND MERRICK BUTTE

      A Companion Press Series book

      All photographs © by David Muench, unless otherwise credited.

      www.davidmuenchphotography.com

      Text © 1992, 2015 by Anne Markward.

      Historical images from the Goulding’s, Museum Collection, Monument Valley, Utah, used with permission.

      Red © 2015 (p. 40) and untitled: I walk in beauty that . . . © 2015 (p. 84) by Esther G. Belin, reprinted with permission.

      www.bitterwater.weebly.com

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, introduced into a retrieval system, or copied in any way without permission in writing from the publisher.

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930304

      ISBN 978-0-944197-01-1

      Graphic Arts Books®

      An imprint of

      P.O. Box 56118

      Portland, OR 97238-6118

      (503) 254-5591

      www.graphicartsbooks.com

      Produced with care by

      Collaborative Publishing Services

      Bozeman, Montana

      Jane Freeburg, Editor/Designer

      www.collaborativepublishingservices.com

      Printed in China

      Contents

      Preface

      David Muench

      Rhythms of the Land:

      AN INTERPRETIVE ESSAY

      Anne Markward

      Monument Valley:

      A PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION

      David Muench

      ABOUT THE IMAGES

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      MOTHER AND DAUGHTER BELOW EAR OF THE WIND

      EVENING BUTTES

      ICONIC BUTTES AFTER PASSING STORM

      Preface

      Several years ago my wife, Ruth, and I visited Goulding’s Trading Post Museum in Monument Valley. I wanted to show her the place I had known as Harry and Mike Goulding’s home, a place that offered me entrance into the astonishing world of Monument Valley.

      It was a warm, inviting home. The Gouldings, who had come to Monument Valley as traders in 1924, became a vital part of the Navajo community in which they lived. In welcoming my parents and me into their world, they provided the small child I was with what I now understand as among the most powerful of my formative experiences.

      The friendship my photographer father and writer mother shared with the Gouldings ensured my parents traveled often to Monument Valley. My parents’ passion for the landscape, and the people who lived in it, deeply influenced me. And the world the Gouldings laid before me was enthralling. As I grew older, I sometimes traveled the area with Harry when he went to visit Navajo families and old friends, or toured with him and Navajo guides as he drove his jeep to areas he’d heard about but hadn’t seen. Unconsciously, I was connecting with the great Navajo homeland. While I was taking it in as a boy, beginning to see it as the photographer I would become, I don’t think I missed much of it. The monolithic forms of rock, the ever-changing light, the play of sand and

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