Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Tuesday, August 23rd, morning-  We spent the night in Kayenta, and had a pleasant surprise at breakfast.  There was a tour group in the breakfast room listening to a Navajo gentleman talking about the Navajo Code Talkers.  During WWII, a group of Navajo Indians was recruited to create an unbreakable code, used in the Pacific theater against the Japanese.  They were required to be trained as Marines, and created the code from words and letters in the Navajo language.   The code was never broken and remained secret until the 1980's, when the information was released to the public.  The speaker had joined the service at age 15, after lying about his age, and served in the Pacific theater until the end of the war.  They are trying to raise money for a museum that will tell their story before they are all gone.  Very interesting talk!    
       Monument Valley, located a short ways outside of Kayenta, is a colorful region, covering several thousand square miles within the Navajo Indian Reservation, where red stone monoliths tower up to 1000 feet over the valley.  It may look familiar to some, as the valley was used in several early cowboy movies.  The main part of the valley is accessed from a large visitor center, where tours can also be booked.  We opted to take the drive ourselves, and think we made the right decision, is spite of the gravel road throughout the valley being pretty rough in places.  Glad we hadn't washed the car- covered with red dust!
        The drive took us about an hour and a half, with many stops at the pull-outs to take photos.  Many of the views were really impressive!  We noticed that many of the tour vehicles were pretty fast on the rough roads, and doubt those folks got very many good photos!  We were happy to have started our drive early, as the clouds were thickening up and we could see lightning in the distance.  Wonder what that red dust drive would be like after rain?
        The clouds got very black, and I took a photo of one of the monoliths on the way in to the park, and took it again on the way out- you can see how black the sky was.  We stopped for lunch, hoping the storm would blow through before we had to leave.  These monsoon storms remind me a little of the summer tropical downpours we sometimes get in the Southeast, except they do not seem to move.  They pick a spot, and just rain on it...
        We were headed further east to see Canyon de Chelly.  The trip down was pretty interesting.  Initially, we drove through very heavy rain then, after turning south, we quickly drove out of the rain.  Every time we turned a little east, we got rained on, then as the road turned south, it would stop.  Finally, we were south of the storm and I could look to my left and see it sitting there raining heavily.  Weird....