I mentioned a few posts back that I would elaborate on why Monument Valley Tribal Park is such a special place for me and why I’ve longed to visit the site since I was probably nine or ten years old.

Yes indeed I was drawn to the valley partly because its contours are the basis for three out of four Big Thunder Mountain attractions Disney Parks around the world.

That the “Mittens” (West and East Mitten Buttes) of Monument Valley are so recognizable around the world is due to the Western genre of cinema.

The Westerns of John Ford

For most Americans, Monument Valley became cemented in the public imagination due to the films of one man, famed director John Ford (1894–1973). Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948). and most notably The Searchers (1956) all feature the vistas and Mittens of the valley as the primary canvas for their narratives. Ford shot a total of ten films here, and many other directors have followed in his stead.

When Ford first saw Monument Valley, he knew it was something special. And moreover, something inherently cinematic about the look of the place. Settings on film have to read for an audience immediately, communicating through visual literacy. Hyperbolic, iconic, and unmistakable.

As the story goes, John Ford’s discovery and popularization of the valley is credited to Harry Goulding, provisioner and trader to the local Navajo population. After visiting the region with a friend in 1921, two years later Golding and his wife claimed 640 acres and began raising sheep and trading with nearby Native Americans. Towards the end of the 1920s they established their Monument Valley Trading Post which later evolved into a lodge. “Goulding’s Monument Valley” still does business today.

According to the Goulding’s organization, it was the Great Depression which brought Harry and John together:

So Harry and Mike set out on a journey to Hollywood, California with their last $60. By luck and perseverance, Harry met the famous director John Ford. When Ford saw Harry’s photos of Monument Valley, he knew it was the perfect location for his next movie. The Gouldings received an advanced payment, and in a few days, John Ford and his crew began filming Stagecoach starring John Wayne.

The valley’s Hollywood fame goes well beyond Ford however. There’s an entire wikipedia page devoted to films shot on location here.

However, most of them are not the reason I’m so personally attached to Monument Valley…

Airwolf and the Lady’s Lair

That honor goes to Airwolf, an action-adventure series which ran from January 1984 (the two-hour pilot movie debuted directly following the Super Bowl that year) to the spring of 1986 on CBS. A syndicated fourth season, shot in Canada, ran on the USA Network basic cable channel with a completely different cast (but the same aerial stock footage) until August 1987, but let’s try and forget that completely.

Airwolf starred Jan-Michael Vincent as Stringfellow Hawke, a loner Vietnam veteran and test pilot who steals a top secret, supersonic stealth helicopter “Airwolf” back from Gaddafi (Libya being one of the more popular bad guys of the Reagan era). Helping him is sidekick Dominic Santini (Ernest Borgnine). Hawke brokers with his intelligence community contact Archangel (Alex Cord) that he won’t return Airwolf unless the government can find his brother who is MIA in Southeast Asia. Thus the premise is typical of other such competing shows like Knight Rider and The A-Team; Hawke and Santini use the helicopter to go on missions which defy traditional intervention as “outsiders.”

As I loved the show so dearly as a child—watching it after it was canceled, for years, first on the USA Network and then KTLA 5—I could on and on, but I’ll spare you and just provide a link to the wiki.

Typical of other “hardware” series of the 1980s, the star of the show was really the helicopter itself, which they affectionately call “The Lady.” Hawke refuses to return Airwolf to the government agency which developed it, so he needs to hide it somewhere. This became a running trope during the first season of the show, that certain government operatives are always on Hawke’s heels but can’t find the chopper.

By the magic of location shooting, where he secreted away The Lady was Monument Valley. In the show this hiding place, a sort of cave with a hole in the top for the helicopter to enter and exit, was known as “The Lair.” As you can see in the map above, a composite of two different mesas were filmed for the “fly-in” and “walk-in” views for this location.

Because it was obviously quite expensive to fly the star helicopter (a modified Bell 222) and a whole second unit crew out on location, they only went twice: early December 1983 and then again in July 1984.

In the pilot episode “Shadow of the Hawke,” Dominic flies Stringfellow out to what he thinks will be a good hiding place. “This is it. Valley of the Gods. Even the Indians don’t come up here,” Ernest Borgnine says, establishing its remoteness. The name he gives is confusing, though, because there is a real Valley of the Gods with similar scenery just across the border in Utah.

The script had to explain the unexpected storm which befell the second unit photography. Thus Dominic notes that “there’s always a little snow up here, even in the summer” allowing for the use of the footage year-round. They then approach Thunderbird Mesa and attempt to fly into “The Lair.”

When Airwolf was depicted as leaving “The Lair” it was shown from this angle. In reality there is no cave at the bottom which a helicopter (or today, I suppose, a drone) could hover into and land.

Watching this stock footage over and over on series was fascinating to me as a child, because a.) snow on Southwestern-type rock formations looks very cool and b.) I was young enough to think that it might be movie magic that it was even snowing in the desert.

Southwestern snow, everywhere. It all looked so strange, particularly when I watch reruns of Airwolf it was invariably during the summer months. Where was this magical place? I didn’t know what Monument Valley was at that age. It seemed sort of unreal. It looked kind of like the Grand Canyon, and I had seen pictures of that. Maybe it was nearby?

Comically, this wintertime footage of the valley was also used whenever Airwolf went flying off to a cold locale—repeatedly violating the borders of the U.S.S.R.—and as it was a hastily edited show which was heavily reliant on stock footage, we got things like what you see above from that initial second unit shoot, which could be tundra anywhere I suppose.

But while flying through “Russia” or “Alaska” you’d suddenly get a shot like this. Of course I didn’t realize how cheesy this is until a got a little older.

In July 1984 the show’s second unit returned to shoot more footage of the Airwolf Bell 222 before the start of the 84-85 season. This time the valley appropriately scanned as “desert.” The motion blur as seen above is because Airwolf is supposed to be supersonic, even though it’s impossible for helicopters to fly faster than sound (due to something in physics called “flow separation”). So they sped up the footage instead.

In the show’s second and third seasons, this “natural” and “expected” summertime footage was used exclusively, and the snowy Monument Valley featured in that first short episode run (Airwolf had been a midseason replacement) was never seen again.

So much for there always being a little snow “even in the summer.”

The other thing about Airwolf’s hiding spot is that Hawke and company are always a short flight or drive away, despite being headquartered in Southern California. Often they appear to retrieve the helicopter within minutes of needing it. In one first season episode, the “Valley of the Gods” was shown to be found on a “Las Vegas sectional map” but still, in Dom’s Bell JetRanger, that’s quite a jaunt.

The entire three or four hours I spent at Monument Valley, there was only one album in the CD player of my truck: the wonderful Airwolf Extended Themes soundtrack (2014) produced by Mark J. Cairns. This allowed me to live out my childhood memories of lying on the floor of the family den, transfixed by this supersonic stealth helicopter and its secret hiding place, “The Lair” in the “Valley of the Gods.”

Where You’re Going There Are No Roads

Yet there’s still one more reason I was delighted to finally make it to Monument Valley after all this time.

The year after Airwolf debuted, Back to the Future (1985) appeared in theaters, and my childhood brain was forever changed. The eventual trilogy would become one of my very favorites. While my schoolmates were playing Star Wars and Han Solo during recess, I was dreaming of my own Delorean time machine and imagining travelling back in time at 88 miles per hour.

Back to the Future III (1990) is the final installment. I won’t get into to all the details, but suffice it to say, present-day (1985) Doc Brown is trapped one hundred years ago in the Old West. 1955 Doc has to help 1985 Marty McFly go back to rescue his future self and prevent him from being murdered.

What’s so appropriate—and for my purposes, revelatory—is the set piece director Robert Zemeckis and crew came up with for the time travel sequence back to 1885. Zemeckis not only sought Monument Valley for the location shoot (which is somehow only a short drive for Doc from Hill Valley, California; then again on Airwolf they made it out from Van Nuys on a weekly basis) but decided that Marty depart from a midcentury drive-in movie theater.

Note the painted mural of charging Indians below the screen. Marty says to Doc that if he drives towards the screen he’s “going to crash into those Indians.” Doc reminds him that he’s “not thinking fourth dimensionally” and that once he travels back in time “those Indians won’t even be there.”

The joke is that as Marty reaches the drive-in screen, accelerating to 88 mph, he’s instantly transported back to 1885 and what was a painting becomes real. The Indians, being chased by a brigade of the U.S. Calvary, are charging straight towards him in the Delorean.

Above is the whole clip so you can see how clever the shot is.

There are a couple of things going on here. First, in a very real sense, the movie screen is a kind of time machine, transporting us to whatever setting the film requires. The audience enters the image to experience a movie, just as Marty penetrates the drive-in screen and “smashes” into the past.

Second, Monument Valley represents “The Western” as a film genre. Marty isn’t actually travelling to the real past, rather, he’s travelling to the Old West as it is represented in the movies. I’m pretty sure Zemeckis only intended the location to be a loving tribute to all the John Ford Westerns shot here which he probably watched as a kid. But taken critically, it’s actually a profound statement. Monument Valley = the Western genre, and Marty driving through the movie screen = literally entering that genre.

Later in the film, Doc and Marty attempt to get the Delorean up to 88 mph using six horses to pull it. Again, this is a clever tribute to the first feature Ford shot here (at Goulding’s suggestion), the John Wayne classic, Stagecoach.

So why all this about Airwolf and Back to the Future III…what does this have to do with theming? Well, my emotional connection to this landscape only exists cinematically. Monument Valley is a visual feast in its own right, as magnificent as the Grand Canyon or any number of other National Parks in the region. But if not for film and television, it wouldn’t hold such powerful, potent nostalgia for me.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I wanted to drive through the valley like Marty McFly did before me. I wanted to imagine flying through the landscape in Airwolf (and listening to the show’s soundtrack allowed me to do just that). And why should I be? This is very common phenomenon. There are entire tourism sectors based solely in televisuals, from visiting “James Bond Island” in Thailand to staying the night in a “Hobbit Hole” in New Zealand.

As my colleague Gregory Turner-Rahman and I argue in our award-winning article, “The End of Architecture: Theme Parks, Video Games, and the Built Environment in Cinematic Mode,” the movies colonize our experiences of the physical and virtual world, and alter our perceptions and expectations of spaces. My satisfying response to Monument Valley is just one more example.