Oljato: Moonwater at the Edge of the Monuments
Near Kayenta, Arizona
Oljato is a Navajo word meaning moonwater, and the name fits. Springs seep from the base of the red sandstone mesa here, and on clear nights the formations catch the moonlight in a way that makes the whole landscape shimmer.
The same John Wetherill who built the Kayenta trading post established Oljato's first post in nineteen oh six, hauling supplies by horse-drawn wagon from Gallup, New Mexico, a twenty-one-day round trip. The present stone trading post building dates to nineteen twenty-one. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty, the structure has been abandoned for years and was named one of America's Most Endangered Historic Places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in twenty twenty-one.
The surrounding community of Oljato-Monument Valley straddles the Utah-Arizona border and is home to fewer than a thousand Navajo residents, many of whom still run livestock across the same red-sand flats where John Ford once set up his cameras. The park that put Monument Valley on every map is run under Navajo Tribal authority.
