We left Page, Arizona, under a sky that couldn’t decide what kind of blue it wanted to be — a slow-swirled gradient of cobalt and cotton. The bike throbbed under us like a restless animal. Spring had just begun to flirt with the land, but the cold still clung to the shadows like a bad idea.
There are places you ride through, and places you ride into. Monument Valley is the latter. It has gravity. Those red sandstone sentinels rising from the valley floor feel like a myth someone left behind, half-carved and humming. They appeared slowly, as all sacred things do — first a shoulder, then a silhouette, and then, suddenly, a world.
We took the long way in. Dirt roads that flirted with collapse. Switchbacks etched into rock like ancient brushstrokes. It’s the kind of riding that strips you down to instinct — grip, breath, engine, grit. I didn’t know how long we’d be out there. I just knew we’d brought enough water, enough gas, and a half-reliable tent.
That first night we camped beyond the park boundary, somewhere anonymous and vast. No cell signal. No headlights. Just us and the stars. The wind kept up its low conversation with the scrub brush and I kept trying to decode it — thinking maybe, if I listened hard enough, it would tell me something I didn’t know I needed to hear.
It didn’t. That was the point.
In the morning we woke up covered in a thin film of red dust — like the desert had claimed us in the night. My boots were stiff with frost and my knuckles ached from the cold. I drank instant coffee out of a dented enamel mug and watched the sun light up the mesas like a slow fire.
We moved camp the next day, chasing silence. Found a place framed by two buttes where the ground dipped into a shallow wash. We laid the bike down and let the day pass in soft increments: reading, walking, sitting, forgetting. I kept thinking of time differently out there — not as something to fill, but as something to surrender to. Like the valley itself.
The last night, the moon rose fat and low over the rocks. We built a small fire and ate canned beans like cowboys who’d misplaced their horses. I remember the taste more than the food — fire, salt, satisfaction.
I don’t know what I took from Monument Valley. Maybe that’s why I haven’t stopped thinking about it. There are no epiphanies in the desert — only echoes. You go there not to find yourself, but to be stripped of the selves you don’t need anymore.
And the road back? It never feels the same. That’s how you know it worked.
