Getting to Goldtooth

NAVAJO INDIAN RESERVATION Getting to Goldtooth

The Navajo lady at the Tuba City trading post responded to my question, "How can I get to Goldtooth?" with a question of her own: "Why in the world would you want to get to Goldtooth?" Since another customer was awaiting her attention and an honest answer would have taken a long time, I just said I'd never been there and was curious. But now that I'm writing to the readers of Arizona Highways, I'll try to explain.

I had been searching my AAA "Indian Country Guide Map" looking for an isolated place to have two characters meet to commit a dastardly deed in one of the Navajo Tribal Police mysteries I was trying to finish. Our high, dry Arizona-New MexicoUtah landscape is endowed with a wealth of such places, but for plot reasons I wanted one near the Hopi Reservation-Navajo Reservation border. I also prefer places endowed with the interesting names our ancestors gave their communities. Lots of those available, too, but I had already used Lower Greasewood, Blue Gap, Steamboat, Burnt Water, Old Leupp, Lower Colonias, Rotten Bananas and even both Upper and Lower Nutria. I was looking for something new.

I found Goldtooth on my map, 24 miles southeast of Tuba City on the great rolling emptiness of Ward Terrace. That name seemed to me as interesting as the mystery I was writing, but I had never been there. I spent time remembering what abandoned villages of Arizona's Painted Desert are like, mixed them together, and applied that to Goldtooth without going to take a look at Goldtooth itself. A lot of my readers tell me they like my landscapes better than my stories, so my rule has been accuracy. The violation bothered me. So Marie and I headed for Goldtooth.

A GREAT TRIP, 160 miles, more or less, from Window Rock to Moenkopi on State Route 264. It's an easy three hours and 15 minutes drive if you can resist the endless urges to duck into such fascinating places as the Kinlichee Ruins (now a Navajo Tribal Park) or the old Hubbell Trading Post, (now a national monument) or the Jeddito Chapter House (in the wee bit of Navajoland surrounded by Hopi Reservation) or historic Keams Canyon, or the countless places that tempt the curious as State 264 wanders up and over the Hopi First, Second and Third mesas and past the Hopi villages. Marie and I, never able to resist such temptations, took about six hours to make that journey and thus rolled down the Third Mesa slopes toward Moenkopi in early afternoon. We figured we were miles from the U.S. Route 160 junction at Tuba City and about 7 miles from the place where, according to my AAA map, the road to Goldtooth joins 264. We slowed down and started looking out the passenger side window for the junction. We saw nary a sign of a junction, nor of any road of any sort leading southward across the rolling and treeless plains of Ward Terrace. We drove slower and slower, down into Moenkopi Wash, through Moenkopi village, the residents of which were engaged in a ceremony down below the highway and not available to handle questions.

So we continued onward to the Tuba City trading post, to the Navajo lady and her instructions on how to find Goldtooth. "Go back through Moenkopi on Highway 264," she told us. "When you get out of the village, across Moenkopi Wash, go back up the side of the slope there, have your window rolled down and be watching the side of the pavement. In just a mile or so you'll see a place where people have been turning off the highway and out into the sagebrush. That's where you turn off. Then it's about 15 miles to Goldtooth.

BY MY CALCULATIONS, it was 15.4 miles from the point we jolted off the pavement onto the dirt and a drive I would recommend to anyone who wants a view of the quiet, silent, empty world as it was before sloppy, careless humanity invaded it. It's hardly necessary to tell Arizona Highways readers that there was no traffic, no traffic sounds, no fumes and only the dust kicked up by our own wheels. Only sagebrush, rabbit brush, snakeweeds and the endless variety of demure little blossoms produced by dry country grasses. To our left, the cliffs of the nearest Hopi mesa dappled by cloud shadows, to the right the ridge of Gray Mountain and the Coconino Rim and in the blue distance far ahead the shape of Newberry Mesa and the butte that once reminded some antiquarian of Montezuma's chair. And over it all arched an immense deep blue high-country sky, decorated here and there by the rising columns of clouds promising brief afternoon thundershowers.

I must also report that Marie and I also saw one windmill, far west toward the Colorado River, one windmill a bit closer out in the sagebrush flats toward Third Mesa, and three cows munching on some grass discovered amid the sage. The road wandered silently south, following the ups and downs of the