Arizona’s Monument Valley: A Stranger to Americans, Loved by Europeans

Timothy Egan visited the iconic American landscape of Arizona’s Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park—if you’ve watched a John Wayne movie, you’ve probably seen it—and, strangely, didn’t see many other Americans. “Monument Valley is full of Europeans, busloads from Italy and Germany and France, trying to experience our Eiffel Tower, our Colosseum,” Egan writes in an excellent piece in Sunday’s New York Times. “They take pictures of themselves on horseback, posed in front of a mesa that looks to be half the size of St. Peter’s Basilica. But where are the Americans?” Egan immerses himself in the Valley, and finds that as the “lone Yank” visiting John Ford Point, one of the spectacular vistas in the park, he never felt more American. 

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