Monument Valley. Nature miracle

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Monument Valley. Nature miracle

Wonders of nature

Americans have a strange, enthusiastic attitude towards deserts. In this country, there are a good two dozen National parks and reserves that protect desert and semi-desert landscapes, which, in general, are not threatened by anyone. For comparison: in the former USSR, on a territory two and a half times larger, out of one hundred and sixty reserves, only ten protected desert areas, and the rest were located in forests, steppes, tundra and mountain ranges.

Among the many natural reserves that lie in the vast deserts of the south and west of the United States are the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River and two other parks in the valley of this river. Devil's Tower, Joshua Trees Park (giant cacti) on the border of Mexico and California, Cactus Park - "Organ Pipes" in Arizona, Death Valley, White Sands Desert, Carlsbad Caverns, Petrified Forest Park, and a number of others.

Monument Valley

But the most popular of them and known to any tourist, at least by hearsay, is the famous Monument Valley. Among the hundreds of thousands of travelers who annually visit this amazing place, there are many guests from abroad, sometimes overcoming great distances to see this miracle of nature.

And Monument Valley is worth it. It is unlikely that anywhere else on Earth you can find so many gigantic stone remnants of the most fantastic forms, which look especially impressive in the dry and transparent air of the desert.

This natural phenomenon is located in the valley of the San Juan River, a tributary of the mighty Colorado, flowing along the border of the states of Utah and Arizona in the southwestern United States.

Unfortunately, black and white photographs are not able to convey the peculiar charm of the landscape of this corner of America, where colors, shapes, shadows and the imagination of the viewer form an amazing fusion, giving rise to fabulous visions that change their appearance every hour throughout the entire time from sunrise to sunset.

When you drive up to Monument Valley along the only highway leading to it through the Arizona desert, it seems that some amazing country appears on the horizon, where ancient castles and oriental temples alternate with modern skyscrapers and abstract sculptures. Here grandeur and menace, humor and revived kind fantasy, heroic impulse and mournful mourning coexist.

The lifeless, polynya-covered plain serves as an ideal neutral background for the most complete perception of the natural monuments of this valley of stone wonders.

The height of the giant remnant rocks, composed of red, brown and yellow sandstones, reaches three hundred meters. The incredible diversity and bizarre appearance of the rocks gave rise to their unusual names, most of which were born back in the XNUMXth century, when the first white people appeared in the valley.

However, in those years, few daredevils managed to get into this inhospitable desert region, moreover, inhabited by warlike Navajo Indians. This tribe, by the way, is one of the largest in the United States (now the Navajos number about a quarter of a million people) and one of the few who have managed to benefit from communication with the pale-faced. Back in the XNUMXth century, they adopted from the Spaniards the skills of handling the sheep brought here and soon completely changed their economic life, becoming real sheep breeders. This allowed them to successfully exist in the harsh conditions of the desert. The new way of life of the Navajos is preserved even now, constantly improving the quality and style of their products made of sheep's wool. And I must say that skillfully woven blankets and rugs with Navajo ritual drawings cause a real stir among tourists.

Mass visits to Monument Valley began after 1870, when the Indian Wars ended, and especially since the second half of the XNUMXth century, when the United States was swept by a tourist boom. The endless expanses of the valley, the flat terrain and the enormous size of the rocks allow you to view most of the monuments directly from your car. However, a traveler will get a truly strong, almost real feeling of being in a fantasy world if he climbs onto one of the outcrops and admires the landscape from a bird's eye view.

From above, the "Castle" looks especially majestic - a mighty three-hundred-meter massif with a flat top crowned with teeth. "Mittens" look somehow childishly provocatively - two symmetrical rocks with turrets sticking out from the side, similar to protruding fingers.

In the distance rise "Three nuns", headed by a tall (245 meters) "Abbess". And not far from the "Rukavichek" the portly "Natka" sat down on the nest. The vagaries of nature have turned some rocks into the likeness of gigantic mushrooms, and some remnants resemble gigantic stumps, cacti or cypresses.

The history of the emergence of this amazing landscape is generally traditional for such remnant groups. For millions of years, on the site of the current plain, the waves of the shallow Mesozoic sea lapped, at the bottom of which layers of sandstones were deposited. At the end of the Cretaceous period, as a result of the uplift of the earth's crust, a vast sandstone plateau formed on the site of the sea, which was subsequently washed away by rains and destroyed by frost and wind until it was dissected into separate mesas, and then into scattered towers and columns.

It must be said that nature did not skimp on stone miracles for the southwestern states of the USA. Just to the west of Monument Valley, at the confluence of the San Juan and the Colorado, over the drying-up Bridge Creek, the beautiful, absolutely symmetrical arch of the Rainbow Bridge soared into the sky.

This striking natural bridge has long been known to white Americans only from Navajo legends, who told their "pale-faced brothers" of the mysterious "petrified rainbow" nestled in their native mountains.

Interested in this legend, three daredevils ventured in 1909 to climb deep into the inaccessible desert mountains, to where the sacred Navajo Mountain rises above San Juan. Having arrived at the foot of the mountain, they descended into the gorge and... gasped with delight: a gigantic almost hundred-meter arch of sandstone shimmering with pink, bluish and red-brown shades rose above the rocky canyon.

It was so perfect that it was hard to believe that it was not the creation of human hands. Soaring from a rock merged with its base, the arch flies through a canyon eighty-five meters wide, rising to a height of about ninety meters above the river. Under it, the Spasskaya Tower of the Kremlin or the Ivan the Great Bell Tower would fit freely. The arch is thirteen meters thick and ten meters wide, so that the natural bridge could easily accommodate a two-lane highway.

For a long time, the Navajo Indians considered the "stone rainbow" sacred and annually gathered to worship it. But getting to these places along the mountain paths was very difficult. Only after the construction of a dam on the Colorado River in 1963 and the formation of the lake-reservoir Powell, it became possible to easily get to the Rainbow Bridge on an ordinary pleasure boat, and masses of tourists were able to see the amazing creation of nature not only in photographs.

Natural stone arch bridges are found in various parts of our planet. They are in China, in the Middle East, in Armenia. But the state of Utah was the luckiest. They even organized the Stone Arches National Park, three hundred kilometers north of the Rainbow Bridge, in an area famous for its many bizarre rocks and stone bridges of various shapes. They have been given poetic and sometimes playful names: "Dark Angel", "Ship Pine", "Farewell", "Vault of Heaven", "Landscape" and even "Old Maid's Robe".

And in the Painted Desert, located south of the Monument Valley, a century and a half ago, a lieutenant of the American army, Sitgreaves, discovered the remains of a truly unprecedented forest. The stumps and logs, which somehow ended up in the middle of the desert, were like two drops of water similar to the real ones: with bark, knots and annual rings. But they did not consist of wood, but of the strongest stone, as if an unknown wizard had made them turn to stone with his spells.

The Indians who visited these places believed that the arrows of the god Thunder were lying in the rocky desert. In fact, here in Arizona, on the left bank of the Colorado River, the largest fossil forest known on the planet has been discovered. It has been preserved since the Triassic period of the Mesozoic era, when dinosaurs roamed in the mighty coniferous forests that surrounded the swampy valley.

As established by scientists, the height of ancient trees was an average of thirty meters, and their diameter reached two meters. However, other giants were twice as tall and thicker. True, today almost all logs have fallen into several pieces, but this allows you to see the whole variety of quartz crystals and its varieties, which replaced rotten wood during the crystallization process.

Stone copies of trees on cuts sparkle with crystals of pink amethyst, black morion, transparent rock crystal and fine white quartz, shimmer with whimsical patterns of chalcedony, jasper, onyx and carnelian. The largest clusters of unique logs in this stone thicket received special names depending on the appearance of the trunks found: "Blue Mountain", "Crystal Forest", "Rainbow Forest", "Black Forest" and "Jasper Forest".

And on the outskirts of this amazing corner of the desert, the Indians many centuries ago built a sanctuary from especially beautiful stone trunks and called it "Agate House".

This area, like most of Arizona, is a desert that receives only about two hundred millimeters of rain a year, but the precipitation falls to the ground, usually in the form of torrential downpours that wash away up to three centimeters of soil. And every such rain washes out of the earth new, previously hidden treasures of the petrified forest.

This country of stone castles, bridges and forests literally fascinates the traveler with its bizarre outlines of palaces and towers in the rays of dawn and the pink semicircle of the arch above the deserted canyon. And not just a name on the map will remain for him Indian words - Utah, Navajo, Spanish - Arizona, Colorado, English - Monument Valley, Rainbow Bridge, Petrified Forest ...

Author: B.Wagner

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