Navajo County

Navajo County OF MOUNTAINS . . . THE PAINTED DESERT LAND OF THE NAVAJO AND HOPI

IF YOU ARE looking for distant places, the exciting discoveries just beyond the horizon. may we recommend Navajo County? An! if you would start your trip up in Monument Valley, where a line that doesn't exist separates Arizona from Utah, and Navajo County from San Juan County, and travel due south, or as due south as the lonely roads will let you travel, before you come to Black River in the southern-most part of the county you'll have a thousand precious travel memories and tale after tale to tell the folks back home. And if you're one of those persons who would sooner live your history than read it. you'll find geological records all over the county that write time in terms of millions of years. You'll find a tale of time and the centuries in Navajo National Monument and as you climb through the passageway of Betatakin (bee-tah-tah-kin) Ruins you might see in the shadows the ghosts of an ancient people who lived there over a thousand years ago.

If you don't care to push the sleepy centu-ries back quite so far you could go into the land of the Hopi (hoe-pee) and stroll the streets of Old Oraibi where men have come and gone since the fourteenth century in what is termed the oldest inhabited village in the United States.

Should you care to temper your travels with an ounce of philosophy go to any of the Hopi pueblos Hotevilla, Bacabi, Oraibi, Sichomovi, Hano, Walpi, Shipolovi, Polacca, Mishongovi, Toreva, or Shongopovi, and watch the Hopi in their patient, simple way of life and return to your travels a much wiser man. These brave, proud people, nursing their scant fields of corn and drying their shrivelled little peaches, tending their flocks and making their pottery and their baskets . . . these people know the lesson of patience taught them by the cruel drought, the hard winds of winter, the heat of a mad summer sun. They will teach you how a people can love their

DRAWINGS FOR ARIZONA HIGHWAYS BY ROSS SANTEE

Leaving Kayenta, the motorist travels northward the lonely road to a historic landmark in northern Navajo CountyAgathla Peak. Beyond is Monument Valley.

Mishongnovi is one of the Hopi pueblos, perched in all its picturesqueness on a mesa top.

If you're lucky the trout will bite for you.

Kayenta (Kay-yen-tay) in the center of Navajoland. Here is a reservation subagency, and here Hosteen John Wetherill has lived these many years.

Part of Navajo County extends into the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, home of the White Mountain Apaches. Below, a view of the sparse, vast acreage the Navajo call home.

native land and they'll teach you that the bonds of the family and the clan are strong and that the gods you believe in, you should believe in deeply and with all your heart. Some may come down from their mesas, driven by necessity, to work for the railroad at Winslow and Holbrook but the ties of their mesa pueblos and their people will always be strong. In our hurrying-scurrying world, our great jump-about, live-about world, the Hopi have acquired a tranquility and a steadfastness refreshing and fortifying to see. In their pueblos they live and die as their fathers, and their fathers' fathers have lived and died, just as their sons will, and their sons' sons.

If you seek to learn as you travel, follow the distant roads in the land of the Navajo. This proud nomad has lessons for you, too. As you travel along, in 20th Century fashion, you'll come upon a Navajo and his family in a covered wagon, a million miles, it seems, from nowhere. As you look across the broad mesa, the little spot of color is a Navajo horseman, all dressed up, calling on his best girl, perhaps (if Navajo blades call on their best girls). Then you'll come upon a trading post, and invariably you'll find a friendly trader to greet you. White folks don't get out this way so much, you know, and it's always nice to see people and talk awhile.

Notes on NAVAJO

Below, a view of Keet Seel Ruins in Navajo National Monument.

Navajo National Monument the winds that blow through these walled canyons tell of another people of another age. Here one hears the echoes of the passing centuries, sees the footprints of a lost civilization. Many. many yesterdays have left here their marks in solid stone, to be erased only by time and the weather.