Moenkopi

Why should it be a National Park?

The Moenkopi formation is a geologic layer found in the American southwest that was laid down around 240-million-years-ago. The rocks from this period are mostly like the red rocks found in the Colorado Plateau desert, but incredible and strange outliers are particularly common in a virtually ignored section of north-central Arizona. The defining features of these lands are Coal Mine Canyon, Ha Ho No Geh Canyon, and Blue Canyon, which does not resemble the nearby red rock desert that has become synonymous with Arizona. Instead, they boast a color palette of pale blues, whites, browns, yellows, pinks, purples, and greens. This portion of the Moenkopi formation has an array of canyons, painted deserts, fossils, and buttes. However, since it has no paved roads and is not publicized, only a select few know these amazing canyons exist.

A park here would be Navajo and Hopi led, and the template already exists a hundred miles east. Canyon de Chelly is a unit of the National Park System sitting entirely on tribal trust land: the Navajo Nation holds title, families still farm the canyon floor, and the Park Service interprets and protects without owning an acre of it. Nothing in that arrangement is a lesser version of a park. It is a better one, and it is the arrangement these canyons deserve.