Drinking in the sight of Monument Valley for the first time, I realise it's not my first time at all. It's been used as a movie location nearly as much as New York City.

John Ford was first, setting his 1939 western Stagecoach here, and the valley became a muse for the ornery director. Its distinctive formations became synonymous with the Wild West itself. Ford committed it to screen until Cheyenne Autumn in 1964, whereupon others took up the mantle and the place has been peopled by celluloid cowboys so often that it feels halfway between a wonder of the world and a movie set.

Ford's longtime collaborator, John Wayne, when he laid eyes on Monument Valley, uttered the famous phrase, "So, this is where God put the West". If so, the Almighty's one hell of a set dresser.

Travelling in
Venturing into the valley by car isn't recommended if you're renting. The roads vary from steep, potholed and uneven rock to shifting wind-blown sand that'll knock the wheels off your wagon faster than Wayne with a Winchester.

We opt to clamber aboard one of the many Navajo-guided tour companies' robust Ford F250 Super Duty pick-ups. Each battered vehicle has about a dozen rudimentary seats welded on to its widened metal flatbed, shaded by a scrap of canvas. Our driver/guide is a smiling Navajo local named Carlos. I clamber into the cab alongside him, and we clatter and judder our way on to the rocky 24km round-trip road down into the Valley.

We pass closer to those three distinctive buttes the Left Mitten, the Right Mitten and Merrick Butte. They seem like actors on their marks, poised and waiting for Ford's voice to boom "Action!". Carlos turns his nose up at the "official" names. I ask what he calls them, expecting a trio of ancient, mystical Navajo appellations in his native tongue.

"The teapot, the coffee pot and the sugar bowl," he laughs.

Our first proper stop is at John Ford's Point overlook. Reputedly the director's favourite spot, this site of many a fake Indian attack is now just as fake a small village of trinket-sellers peddling jewellery, carvings and photos of tourists on a bored-looking horse. The view, however, is priceless.

Carlos calls for us to saddle up and this time I perch on the back of the truck, exposed to the stinging sand. The wind picks up and the valley starts to drift slightly out of focus behind a haze. We pass Thunderbird Mesa, its red sandstone stained dark in the shape of a bird's wing. Carlos points out landmarks and spins yarns until we veer off the trail and on to a road marked "private" a guide's prerogative. We pull up at a remote homestead at the back of the valley.

Monument's people
A young, round-faced Navajo man in a bandanna is digging the wind-blown sand off the fence. His name is Tim, and this place is his home: a couple of tumbledown shacks with roofs weighted down by tyres, a corral, a forlorn-looking basketball hoop, a trio of Navajo hogans (dwellings fashioned by packing earth over a frame of branches) and a higgledy-piggledy outhouse that looks like it could be from the set of a Ford film.

About five Navajo families live in the valley itself, no more than 200 of the "Dine", as they call themselves meaning, simply, "the people". His grandmother is in the hogan across the way. He breaks into a broad grin. "She's really famous, man."

Indeed she is. We'd heard about Susie before we came down. She is literally a living legend. Depending who you ask, her age varies, but the average puts her around 97. John Ford first cast Susie as an extra in The Searchers in 1956, and she was in many of his films.

This petite matriarch holds court in the large hogan, surrounded by her daughters, granddaughters and, quite possibly great-granddaughters all weavers. Here, Carlos explains some of the traditions of the "female" hogan, the heart of the family. Each has nine poles, for the nine months of pregnancy. In effect, it's a womb. The door always faces east, he says, so the Dine can greet the sun each morning and have a fresh chance effectively being "reborn", a central tenet of their belief.

We travel on to Carlos's favourite formations in the valley, the Sun's Eye and Ear of the Wind, both vast holes in the smooth sandstone mesas sculpted by the elements. Carlos and the other Navajo played baseball here and ran in the dunes as kids. Amazingly for this dry canyon, in monsoon season it's a waist-deep lake and the chirruping of frogs can be heard for kilometres.

Our final stop is beneath the soaring ceiling of the formation called "Big Hogan", a 30m-high cave that resembles the inside of a hogan. It's dark and cool, and away from the threatening dust storm brewing outside.

"I'm going to play a welcoming song for you," Carlos says. He has brought a hand drum and a long, intricately woven pouch from the dash of his truck. "Something that will flush the city out of you. Close your eyes. Listen."

Lying back against the cool sandstone, I tip my hat over my face like a snoozing cowboy and let the darkness block out everything but the thunderous sound of Carlos's drumming and the rhythmic cadence of his chant. As mournful notes then soar from his flute, a warm breeze stirs up and embraces us, swirling sand tickling the back of my neck.

Carlos is right - it feels as though this place is very far away, both in time and space, from the soaring towers of concrete and glass, and will be here waiting, long after they're rubble.

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