Honeymoon Day 5 - Durango, CO to Mexican Hat, UT (15 November, 2005)

Got another early start and headed out to Mexican Hat by way of Hovenweep.

My personal opinion here - Hovenweep after Mesa Verde is a letdown with a captial ETDOWN. It has nowhere near the offerings, but it does have one saving grace - few people visit it (compared to Mesa Verde) and the ruins are in a very compact little space that can be hiked around comfortably in an hour (including a point where you traverse the canyon floor - 80' down and 80' up).
We then hopped in the car and headed out to Mexican Hat and Monument Valley. You can see Monument Valley from roughly 40 miles away, and when you get up to it, it just keeps getting better and better.

We pulled into the park ($5 per person) at around 4:45pm and started taking pictures immediately. The Monuments are absolutely enormous and can only be seen 'cleanly' (without shanties and trailer homes) from inside the park...it would have been nice to have an SUV with 4 wheel drive and at least 10" ground clearance, but we didn't have that luxury so we stopped at the first major turnout. The moon was beginning to rise between the monuments so we found some high ground and started taking as many pictures as time, our batteries and the cold would permit.

At about 5:30 we went to the hotel to check in (the San Juan Inn in Mexican Hat) and ate dinner at the restaurant there - good hot beef stew with Navajo Fry Bread.

After dinner, we went back by the front desk to reload Laura with new sunglasses and spoke with the guy at the desk who had worked there off and on for 19 years.

He suggested that if we only had one sunrise in the area...and that we had already seen the monuments at sunset...that we drive north a few miles to Goosenecks State Park and view the sunrise from Mulley Point - you can see the monuments from there and you can also see the San Juan River twist and turn several times in just a few miles.