You've probably seen this wilderness dozens of times—in movies. But its name, its people, may never have been introduced.
Image: Bing Daily Wallpaper · Monument Valley in the Navajo Nation, Arizona, USA (© Westend61/Adobe Stock) · Official original image
Open today's Bing homepage, and a red expanse of wilderness stretches out before you. Several massive sandstone buttes stand alone on the flat earth, clouds hang low, the light has gone slant—it looks like evening.
Bing's title for it is "Silent wilderness, a landscape of living heritage." The first half is easy enough to grasp; the second half is the point—what makes this place special isn't how barren it is, but that it's still alive, still inhabited.
It's called Monument Valley, located within the Navajo Nation at the border of Arizona and Utah.
Three layers of rock, fifty million years
Imagine what this place once looked like: a low-lying basin. Over hundreds of millions of years, sediment worn from the Rocky Mountains by wind and rain filled it layer by layer. Then the earth's crust slowly rose, pushing these sedimentary layers up to an elevation of over 1,700 meters, forming a flat plateau.
Over the next fifty million years, wind and water began subtracting. Softer rock was stripped away first; harder rock remained—what's left are the island-like monoliths you see in the wallpaper.
Their bodies are layered: the broad slopes at the base are softer shale, the sheer vertical cliffs in the middle are hard De Chelly sandstone, and the "cap" on top is another layer of shale, shielding the softer stone below from wind and rain. Some buttes rise 300 meters from the valley floor—roughly the height of a hundred-story building.
In Navajo, this place is called Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii. There are several translations; the general meaning is "the clearing among the rocks," though some render it as "white streaks between the rocks."
One photo album, sixty dollars
In the 1920s, a sheep trader named Harry Goulding and his wife Leone—everyone called her "Mike"—came to this valley and opened a trading post on its edge, exchanging food and household goods with local Navajo people for rugs and jewelry.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, nearby Navajo families were struggling badly. Goulding heard that a movie company was scouting locations in the American Southwest and saw an opportunity. He and Mike took their last sixty dollars and headed to Hollywood. The most important item in their luggage was a photo album of Monument Valley he'd shot himself.
Through luck and sheer persistence, they got a meeting with director John Ford. Ford flipped through the album and decided on the spot. Days later, a film crew rolled into the valley to shoot Stagecoach (1939), starring John Wayne.
It's said that someone, upon seeing this landscape for the first time, remarked, "God put the West here"—the attribution is disputed, some crediting Ford, others Wayne, with no definitive answer. But over the next twenty-five years, Ford returned again and again, turning this red wilderness into the world's image of "the American West." Three of the films he shot here were later added to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
1958: Saying "no"
Tourists poured in. Conservation groups proposed: why not just make Monument Valley a national park?
The Navajo Tribal Council refused. The reasoning was practical—people lived in the valley, there were ranches, and once it became a national park, residents and grazing lands would be lost.
In 1958, the council acted on its own, designating approximately 29,800 acres and establishing the first "tribal park" in American history, allocating $275,000 to build roads and a visitor center. It operates on the national park model, but the managers are the Navajo people themselves.
That's the weight behind those words "living heritage." Today, over 400,000 people come each year to see these rocks. The entrance is in Utah, while the most photogenic spires are actually in Arizona. An official from the Navajo Parks and Recreation Department once told Smithsonian magazine something to this effect: many people recognize this valley from movies, and that's where it ends—its geology, its history, the people who live here, almost no one knows about.
The story continues. In March 2026, the Navajo Nation signed a cooperative agreement with the state of Utah to keep film and television production in Monument Valley and the surrounding area—this time, they're the ones setting the terms.
Next time you spot those three rocks in some old Western, maybe you'll remember: they have a name that isn't "Monument," and they've never moved.
Sources: Bing China homepage (July 30, 2026); Visit Utah and Bluff, Utah official tourism materials; Smithsonian magazine, "Behind the Scenes in Monument Valley"; Goulding's Lodge official history; KJZZ and KNAU reporting on the Navajo Nation–Utah film cooperation agreement (March 2026).