The last movie that my dad and I watched before the roadtrip was The Searches, a John Ford-directed western from 1956 starring John Wayne. It prominently features Monument Valley with such inspiring cinematography that these unique sandstone buttes and red-rock monoliths are now a staple of the American West. Ford used Monument Valley as his set almost exclusively, filming nine movies here, even when a script wasn’t set along the Utah-Arizona border where the park is located. Case in point, The Searchers is supposed to be set in Texas. It has that strong of a presence. It’s the openness of the arid desert and then how the Earth violently shifts to steep rock formations that rise out of the ground like nowhere else in the world.

Monument Valley was the real star of John Ford’s pictures. The lasting effects are seen in today’s movies, TV shows, album covers, cartoons, videogames and commercials. Almost everything that’s supposed to represent the American west uses Monument Valley. From now on, every time I flip through a magazine or up and down the TV channels and stumble upon something random that uses Monument Valley, whether it’s John Wayne’s breakout role in 1939’s “Stagecoach,” Back to the Future III or even a Road Runner cartoon, I can say I camped there.

The openness of this authentic American frontier meant that Monument Valley and its surroundings are very desolate compared to Moab, the college-like town where we stayed last night. We first noticed this when trying to take a detour around the nearby Mexican Hat rock. This sombrero-shaped formation has a 60-foot wide rock resting on top of a smaller rock, giving it the distinct look of a Mexican Hat. While it’s been featured in several movies, including Disney and Pixar’s computer animated film Cars, and a lot of people talked it up at Arches, the road around it was unpaved and no place for my 1997 Corolla. Having almost gotten stuck on the very hilly dirt terrain, we took some quick photos, made an immediate U-Turn on the narrowest of ditch-like roads and continued on the paved US-163 to Monument Valley.

Like Four Corners, the Najavo run Monument Valley, so it’s not a National Park but a Native American reservation. This means that the fee free weekend being offered by the DOI for economic stimulus isn’t in effect here. Still, the $10 camping rate and $5 a person entrance fee would’ve been worth it even if we were allowed to only drive on US-163 and take in the miles-long spectacular views.

We quickly discovered that we’d get a whole lot closer than we had ever imaged. Upon passing through the gate and proceeding on the park’s unpaved road, we were lead to the campground, which was almost empty. We weren’t even sure if this was really the campground. There weren’t many signs, there was literally two tents on this flat stretch of land and it was a stone’s throw away from Mitten View, the most recognizable formation in Monument Valley. We were hesitant to setup because we thought that it was so close that we shouldn’t be allowed to camp here. It was that unbelievable. When we spotted a small “Primitive Campground” sign (which is the understatement of the year), we realized that we could camp wherever we wanted. Naturally, we staked out the tent as close to Mitten View as possible and promptly set up. It was a much faster and smoother experience than the previous camping night.

In the midst of pitching the tent, we noticed two white vans of young French tourists who were temporally using the campground to party. About a dozen girls were listening to loud foreign music on the roof while a dozen more guys were playing soccer (or football, as they would say). This was right near our car. On one of the trips back to the car from where we were setting up the tent, a Michael Jackson song came on and, somehow, I got roped into dancing to it. These French tourists loved it, asked us where we were from and seemed very polite. Sadly, this lively bunch wasn’t camping and the sun was going down. They left in their white party vans and, as the dust from their exit rose up, we ran back downhill to finish setting up. I don’t know what was more of an adrenaline rush: having to do the MJ dance in front of a bunch of randomly cheering French tourists in the middle of Monument Valley or having to rush to finish pitching the tent before dark set in.

The nearby Farview Hotel had sandwiches we could eat, but because we weren’t staying at the hotel we couldn’t sit down and order dinner from the menu inside. Buying a la carte was fine with us. Plus, there was a black-and-white western playing outside on a projector. We thought it’d be a better idea to sit outdoors at the café table and chairs, anyway. It took about 3 minutes for us to realize our mistake. A wild dog approached us from the darkness that blankets Monument Valley’s only inside-the-park hotel. Though initially startled when this animal appeared from the shadows, we were unconvinced that a lone dog was a threat. We slowly continued to eat our sandwiches while our eyes were glued on the dog. Suddenly, a second dog emerged from the hotel’s pitch-black perimeter and I saw a third’s ears perk up in the shadows. We didn’t wait for the third dog to approach us because we figured that there’d be more hungry wild animals if we stuck around. So, without delay, we scrambled back inside and finished our dinner in the confines of the hotel.

Driving back a couple of yards from the hotel to the campground wouldn’t have been a problem in the daytime, but there were no lights with the exception of my car’s dim headlights. So, we drove back very slowly, which is starting to become a trend on the camping portion of our roadtrip. But, there’s a benefit to the park’s pitch-blackness. It gave me an excellent opportunity to check out the countless stars in the sky using my binoculars. It was incredible how many more stars are visible from a dark location like Monument Valley than the suburbs of Philadelphia.

When we woke up this morning, we inquired about jeep or horseback riding tours through Monument Valley, but the Najavo guides wanted far too much money for what it was worth. We had already spent the night on the location where numerous westerns were filmed and we decided to pass considering the cheapest tour was $65 per person for a measly half hour of horseback riding. We had a similar hour-long experience in Palo Duro Canyon for $35, almost half the price for twice as long. So, we opted to save our money, bought lunch and campfire provisions (like S’mores) at Goulding’s Grocery Store and took a photo underneath the Arizona state sign, where the road to Zion National Park dips into Utah’s neighboring state to the south.