Hovenweep & Navajo National Monuments

Southwestern Trip 2022 | Hovenweep National Monument to Lake Powell, AZ | Hovenweep National Monument | Valley of the Gods | Navajo National Monument | Lake Powell | October 2022

We woke with the sun and forced ourselves to pack our tent and hit the road again. It was a cool morning, but not as cold as the night before had been – mostly because of the elevation. Our day started with a short drive through BLM and Navajo land to Hovenweep National Monument, which we arrived at just before the visitor center opened.

The Canyon of the Ancients region, which we had traveled through the night before, is, for all intent and purposes, an extension of Hovenweep National Monument managed by the BLM instead of the NPS. Most all of the ruins, structures, and artifacts in the area (extending to include Mesa Verde, Pecos NHP, and some of the ruins at Canyon de Chelly) date from the same general time period of 700-1300 CE when the Ancestral Puebloans (the Ancestors of the Hopi, Zuni, and other Puebloan peoples) lived and farmed the mesas of the Colorado Plateau. Hovenweep preserves a collection of towers, kivas, and houses concentrated around a well-spring in a small canyon and could be viewed as the ‘Crown Jewel’ of the Canyon of the Ancients area. The Ancestral Puebloans would have lived and farmed here until sometime in the 1300’s when something (climate, water change, social change, war?) caused the people to move to the Rio Grande or Little Colorado. The Navajo and Ute peoples moved into the area shortly thereafter adopting a more nomadic lifestyle.

Documented by Mormon missionaries in the 1850’s, the ruins were already well known by the Ute and Navajo peoples. The term Hovenweep comes from the Ute and means ‘Deserted Valley’ and might have been reference to the belief that the place (having likely been abandoned by the time the Navajo and Ute arrived to the Colorado Plateau) was haunted.

Fortunately for us, Charlotte was able to walk with us as we hiked a loop trail around the towers and ruins. We made the full loop, admiring how well preserved the ruins are and learning more of the history. As we walked around the towers, Charlotte was even more pokey than we were, stopping to sniff much more than we stopped to admire and read signs. That is, until the trail went down into the canyon and then back out, which Charlotte insisted on running both down and up.

Back at the visitor center, we drank water, sat in the shade and considered what we should do next. We got some information from the Ranger on the surrounding area and started making plans for the day.

We knew that we wanted to end the day at Lake Powell west of Page, but the campground we had in mind was very large and dispersed and finding a place to sleep would be no problem. So we had all day to retrace our routes from our 2014 & 2015 Spring Break trips, and let me tell you – there is a lot to do – more than we ever knew back then. We briefly considered driving out of our way to visit Bears Ears and Natural Bridges National Monuments and the Cedar Mesa region, but between restrictions on where Charlotte can go and concern on the road conditions (it had rained heavily for several days before we showed up, making most of the BLM roads questionable) we decided to save it for another time.

Instead we followed roads out of the Hovenweep/Canyons area and then followed roads down towards Mexican Hat and the crossing of the San Juan River. As we drove through we saw many of the roads we had considered before, and even the view from the highway was tantalizing enough to solidify that we must return. Just before Mexican Hat, with Monument Valley in view, we decided to try out the drive through Valley of the Gods.

And wow. Monument Valley is obviously very scenic. It helps that a major highway drives right through and that Forrest Gump stopped running right in front of it – but the Valley of the Gods is equally beautiful. It has the same type of tall red sandstone formations at the cost of driving a dirt road. We just drove and drove admiring the views from the car – while we could have stopped, there just wasn’t any pressing reason to do so as the roads were fine and the views spectacular.

We finished the whole drive, making note that in the future this would be an excellent place to camp, before continuing on driving through Monument Valley, which just felt more crowded and developed than last time we were here. Dirt roads are good roads.

We then retraced our route from 2014 through Navajo land on US-160 and AZ-98. We made a stop at Navajo National Monument to get our National Park cancellation stamps and because Curtis hadn’t been there before (I had visited with my family in 2012, so I didn’t mind staying in the parking lot with Char to let him see it). Curtis walked the trail to the viewpoint overlooking the ruins (which also belong to the Ancestral Puebloan and had a similar history) and Tsegi Canyon which is about as much as you can do in 30 minutes.

The rest of the drive we spent pointing out landmarks we knew like Navajo Mountain and commenting on how much the area has changed. Page itself has exploded with tourist money and even the Navajo services around Antelope Canyon were so much more than when we were here last.

After gassing up in Page, we drove over Glen Canyon Dam and crossed into Utah on US-89 and then immediately went towards Lake Powell at Lone Rock Beach – a free-form campground originally intended to allow people to camp on the beach of Lake Powell. But with the water level so incredibly low, the whole area is just a sand flat and anywhere that isn’t regularly driven on is covered in a thickets of dense thorny brush that is quickly filling in the former lake bed. After setting up our tent, we hiked down to get as close as we could to Lone Rock. The area was much busier than last night’s quiet canyon, but we managed to still find a quieter spot further back from the “beach” and still got a good night’s sleep. Before retiring for the night, we sat and watched the nearly full moon rise behind the lake.