Mexican Hat: Sixty Feet of Balanced Rock and Utah's First Oil Claim
Near Mexican Hat, Utah
The town takes its name from a sandstone pinnacle just north of here, where a sixty-foot-wide cap of rock balances on a narrow pedestal of shale like an upended sombrero. The rock stands on the northeast edge of town, and climbers have put up two routes on it. The layers that make it, resistant sandstone over softer siltstone, were laid down hundreds of millions of years ago.
Prospectors came here in the late eighteen hundreds looking for gold and found oil seeps instead. Around nineteen oh eight, drillers struck oil along the San Juan River, and several companies sank wells along this bend.
The boom passed, as booms do on the Colorado Plateau. Mexican Hat settled into what it is today: a handful of buildings at the river crossing, a population of a few dozen, and one of the most striking rock formations in canyon country hanging over the highway. The town sits just outside the northern boundary of the Navajo Nation and Monument Valley, on United States Route one sixty-three, at an elevation of about forty-five hundred feet. Goosenecks State Park lies about nine miles to the west-northwest, and the Valley of the Gods spreads out to the north along the same highway. The census counted two hundred fifty-nine people here in nineteen ninety and twenty-one in twenty twenty.
