Monument Valley National Park, an area that has long belonged to the Navajo Indians, is a true miracle of nature, created under the influence of wind erosion. For centuries, the winds of Arizona, like the omnipotent sculptors, “carved” towers of bizarre shapes from the rocks. Painted in reddish-brown colors, they appear to be aliens descending to Earth. The Martian landscapes of the unique valley are included in the list of 100 wonders of the world, despite the external lifelessness due to the scarce presence of any vegetation here in the vast expanses.
This natural phenomenon is always open to the public: you can walk along and across the rocky soil, you can watch outlandish creatures from the road while sitting in a car. From an airplane or a helicopter, Monument Valley looks like a surreal landscape of a genius artist. A particularly impressive spectacle is the launch of balloons during the festival of the same name, when enchantingly colored balloons soar over stone statues, competing with them in vivid beauty.
Among the stone monuments there are true masterpieces – the result of the creation of natural forces: in the south of the valley there is a forest of fossilized trees that grew back in the Mesozoic era. Crystals of white quartz, pink amethyst, and black shades of morion have formed on the crevices of gigantic trunks in diameter (up to 2 m) from decayed wood. In the west of the valley there is another stone masterpiece – the Rainbow Bridge, thrown over a small shallow river Bridge Creek. The Indians called it the petrified rainbow. Monument Valley became a public place at the end of the 19th century, when the wars with the Indians stopped, and immediately there was a demand for it among Hollywood filmmakers and tourists.