Description: If you’re not camping, you should stay here. Not that you have a lot of other choices: Monument Valley isn’t easy to reach, and hasn’t been completely transformed by the tourist and hotel industry yet. Kayenta, the nearest town, is a half-hour south (with a Best Western, Holiday Inn Express, and the Navajo-nation owned Kayenta Inn); Mexican Hat is a half-hour north in Utah with the
San Juan Inn,
Mexican Hat Lodge, and a very few other similarly non-chain, low-end, apparently high-character options. But I’d suggest that you pass on all of them, and stay right in the Valley, where Goulding’s has been lodging, feeding and touring guests since they first lured John Ford and John Wayne here to film
Stagecoach in the late 1930s.
The Lodge is five miles from the Navajo Tribal Park: if you’re leaving the park, just keep going when you reach US 163. It’s another two miles to Goulding’s, which is just south off the Olijato Road, tucked up against one of the iconic red buttes strewn throughout the area.
There’s a small variety of accommodations here, but most of the rooms are in two motel-style units. They run parallel to the bluff, one above the other, angled so that each room’s balcony looks directly into Monument Valley. We arrived about 8 pm, checked into our comfortable and fairly spacious room, and parked ourselves on the balcony, watching the sun and clouds playing off the remnants of large plateaus that once filled this Valley.
This was exactly the experience we’d had in mind when we chose this place. Knowing that our time here would be short, we decided to supplement the tour in Monument Valley by staying here for sunset and sunrise, and it worked out perfectly. After dinner, the clouds had cleared a little more, and we watched every last bit of the disappearing light. As the sky darkened, a stream of traffic headed down the road out of the Valley, visible only by their headlights, looking like a highly organized collections of fireflies. Right then, we vowed again not to miss the sunrise.
The room was nicely appointed, with two very comfortable queen beds, a TV and DVD player we didn’t use (movies shot in Monument Valley can be checked out at the front desk), a coffee maker, and a fridge. There was even enough room to tuck the rollaway into the corner. Although the balconies run the length of the building, there are six-foot-high dividers that provide a little privacy. That was nice at 5 am, as we sipped our coffee and watched the buttes emerge from the darkness, this time silhouetted by the approaching daylight.
There’s a little bit of a premium to stay here in-season: rack rate for our room was $180, knocked down 10% by AAA (rates at other times are
significantly lower, particularly in winter). Staying here was worth far more than the $35 we’d have saved at the Kayenta Hampton Inn.
Close