Mexican Hat: A Desert Crossing on the San Juan River
Near Mexican Hat, Utah
Mexican Hat sits at a river crossing on the San Juan in one of the most remote corners of Utah, a canyon-cut desert where the horizon is always red rock and the nearest city is a long drive in any direction. The population here has never reached much beyond a few hundred even at its most crowded, and today calling it a town is generous. There is a post office, a lodge or two, a gas station, and the river.
But Mexican Hat is also a gateway, one of the last American settlements before the country opens into the Navajo Nation and the landscape of Monument Valley, and for generations it has been the place people stop before going further into country that seems to belong to another time. The San Juan River is the reason the town exists at all. The river cuts a deep canyon through the mesa country of southeastern Utah, and Mexican Hat sits at a natural crossing where the terrain allowed a road to reach the water.
Before roads, before the town, before the oil prospectors and their drilling rigs, the San Juan River was a highway. Navajo and Ute peoples traveled its banks, traders carried blankets and silver work across it, and Spanish expeditions recorded its canyons in their journals. The river flows west toward Lake Powell, carving its way through layer after layer of sandstone and shale laid down over hundreds of millions of years.
An early prospector gave the place its first name, Goodridge. The name that replaced it, Mexican Hat, came from the distinctive sombrero-shaped rock formation that sits on the northeast edge of town, a sixty-foot-wide sandstone cap balanced on a narrow eroded pedestal, looking like nothing so much as a hat left by an enormous and forgetful traveler. Today Mexican Hat is a town that exists at the edge of something larger.
The Navajo Nation begins just south of the river. Monument Valley, with its famous buttes and towers, lies a short drive to the south. The San Juan River draws float-trip parties from across the country to its canyon stretches.
Everything around Mexican Hat is enormous and ancient and overwhelming, and the town itself sits in the middle of it with the patient simplicity of a desert crossing that has always been there.
