In my travels, I have visited quite a few Indian reservations. Most of the ones I have visited are in Arizona and New Mexico. Indian reservations come in all sizes. Many of the ones in California are "postage stamp" size. There is one reservation near Sacramento, California that is only slightly larger than a football field! The biggest reservation of them all is the Navajo Reservation, which is mostly in Arizona, but also extends into New Mexico and Utah. This reservation is roughly 60% in Arizona, 35% in New Mexico and 5% in Utah. The Navajo Reservation, or Dinetah in the Navajo language, covers about 30,000 square miles. That makes it about the size of West Virginia and Connecticut combined! This is the reservation I have visited most often because, since it is so big it is pretty hard to travel anywhere in northern Arizona without going through at least part of the reservation. It is a commanding presence in the northern part of the state. I lived in Arizona for 18 years, so I have seen quite a bit of the Navajo Reservation.
Most of the reservation is desert and that is the landscape people associate with the Navajo Reservation. However, there are also grasslands, pinon/juniper scrublands and majestic forests of ponderosa pines. The most heavily forested part of the reservation is the Chuska Mountains. The highest point in this mountain range is Roof Butte at 9,835 feet above sea level. It is on the eastern edge of Arizona, only two miles from the New Mexico border.
The most well known part of the reservation is the iconic and enigmatic Monument Valley, which straddles the Arizona/Utah border in the northern part of the reservation. Monument Valley attracts approximately 3 million visitors per year and is the second most popular tourist destination in Arizona after the Grand Canyon. This area is part of a Navajo Tribal Park that lies mostly in Arizona, but extends into Utah. Numerous movies have been filmed here, mostly of the Western genre. Alot of commercials have been filmed in Monument Valley also. The Mitten Buttes are world famous and are an iconic symbol of the American West.
Alot of the Navajo Reservation consists of red rock formations, such as buttes, mesas and cliffs. This is the scenery that is associated with southern Utah, but alot of northern Arizona and a small part of northwestern New Mexico looks like this also.
