Today was, essentially, a travel day but there were three unusual desert scenes to amuse me along the way.
The first, Monument Valley, is part of the Navajo Nation and is right on the Arizona/Utah line. It is a collection of red sandstone monoliths that are up to 1,000 feet tall and has been featured in western movies for decades. There is a tribal park here that I have visited two or three times previously so I just took photos from the road.
Next up was the other-worldly Goosenecks State Park. Here the San Juan River formed meanders so long ago that it has eroded the rock into 1,000 foot deep canyons. The park is basically a parking lot and viewpoint and this is the panorama in front of you (click to see the full size version).
The last unusual scene is the Moki Dugway. This is a 3-mile section of dirt road switchbacks that carry Utah highway 261 up the side of the cliff called Cedar Mesa. The mesa top is 1,100 feet above the valley. The following photo is not mine as I was unable to find the point where this is taken from but it shows the dugway well. My best views of the dugway are in the road video which, with the map to help make sense of all this, can be found here.
I hated the Dugway, in an economy vehicle with no grip and excessively slippy sandy road with switchbacks and steep drops.. and other vehicles around! There are warnings about it but right in the middle of a normal road I had not expected such a hurdle!
I don’t know when you drove Moki but, I think they have improved it since my first time in the late 90s. It was originally built by a mining company for moving Uranium ore and Utah just took it over as a state road which is why it’s so unusual.