May 23, 2023 Best Seat in the House

The Liberty Gazette

May 23, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: Arizona’s Monument Valley is a movie maker’s paradise. This iconic western backdrop has been used in many films, like the closing scene of the blockbuster How the West Was Won (1962), where George Peppard and family ride off in their wagon singing “I’ll Build You a Home in the Meadow,” and The Searchers (1956), starring John Wayne, who plays an uncle searching for his niece who was abducted by Comanches after they massacred her family.

I love watching westerns on a big screen where I’m engulfed by the landscape. But I had long wanted to see Monument Valley in person. I’ve skirted it many times and have flown over it late at night. It seemed every time I was flying in the Four Corners region something prevented me from making a side trip to this land of bulky stone masses and spires dressed in reds and tans and casting long shadows. 

Flying back from Washington was at our leisure; we were not on anyone else’s schedule, and this allowed us to deviate southward from our planned route for a little flightseeing. 

After clearing high mountains southeast of Salt Lake, we crossed some pinion pine-covered mountains and table-top mesas broken by deep slot-canyons. The Colorado river snaked its way between washed-out walls as it headed toward Glenn Canyon Dam. The aeronautical chart depicted Lake Powell below us, but the only indication we could see was lighter ground where water had once covered it. 

A little further south, we flew over the San Juan River and into the airspace over Navajoland. The Navajo Indian Reservation takes up more than 27,000 square miles—the largest Indian reservation in the United States. Monument Valley is right in the middle of it. Compare that to Grand Canyon National Park, barely seven percent that size at 1,900 square miles. 

The towering sediment and sandstone formations were visible from fifty miles away through dusty, hazy air. Within twenty minutes after first spotting the main formations, we were flying lazy circles over the valley and snapping pictures. 

From my seat, I envisioned tell-tale dust trails kicked up by stagecoaches, cavalry, and attacking warriors. As dust-devils danced across the flat lands between the rock monuments, I imagined natives sending up smoke signals. That in turn made me think of the heroic Navajo Code Talkers of WWII—their Navajo language code never being deciphered by the Japanese. Ours was a unique view, every photo and video shot from a different angle, catching the late morning light in this land of western movie legends. 

When I first moved to Texas, I heard people ask (sarcastically) about another part of the country, “What part of Texas is that?” Ironically, while enjoying a bird’s-eye view of Monument Valley, I thought of The Searchers and director John Ford’s use of this canvas to depict Texas, where that story takes place. I also considered how fortunate we were to get this view from a small airplane. It’s the best seat in the house.

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