What is Sleeping Bear Campground?
Five miles north of the Monument Valley turnoff, just over the Utah line, a graded dirt road called Douglas Mesa Road leaves US 163 toward the San Juan River, and a mile along it a Navajo family has laid out 14 campsites on their land: level dirt pads in a loose loop, most with a covered picnic table, a stone fire ring and an iron grill, an outhouse in the middle, and no water, electricity, trash service or shade. It costs $25 a night, cash, and someone from the family comes by in the truck around eight to collect it. South across the sage, the buttes and mesas of Monument Valley stand along the whole horizon, catching the last light long after the campground is dark.
That view and that price are the entire proposition, and for a lot of people they are enough. The View Campground inside the tribal park costs several times as much and sits in a parking lot of RVs; Goulding’s and the KOA are fine and full. Sleeping Bear is quiet, nearly empty midweek, 25 minutes from the Valley of the Gods and Goosenecks State Park, and the night sky is as dark as anywhere on the Colorado Plateau. One housekeeping note for the map: the owner’s Google listing has two pins, this one and a second eight miles south near Oljato on the Arizona side by Goulding’s. The Arizona pin is a geocoding error. There is nothing there.
What you get is the cheapest legal bed within sight of the monuments, a dark sky and a family host. What you do not get is water, shade, a shower, a store, a reservation or a kiosk; it is a dirt lot with a view, and it is honest about it.
How to camp Sleeping Bear right
Bring exact cash. $25 per night, collected in person in the evening, around 8 p.m.; no reservations, no kiosk, no cards. Pay the family member who gives you a name or a receipt; a few past reviews describe confusion over who was collecting. Call 435-444-7777 if you want to ask about space, but it is rarely full.
Get there. About 5 hours 30 minutes from Old Town. I-17 north to Flagstaff, US 89 north past Cameron, US 160 east through Tuba City to Kayenta, then US 163 north past the Monument Valley Tribal Park turnoff and across the Utah line. About 5 miles past the turnoff, watch for Douglas Mesa Road on the left (west); the campground is about a mile in on graded dirt that any car handles when dry. Navigate to the Utah pin, not the Oljato one. Last fuel, groceries, water and a dump station are at Goulding’s, 9 miles south, and in Kayenta. The Navajo Nation and Utah both observe daylight time, so you lose an hour in summer. There is no gate and no office; pick an open site and wait for the truck.
Pick the season. Open all year. March to May and September to early November are best. Summer afternoons are hot and windy with no shade; winter nights drop well below freezing, and the hogan-and-stove option at Spider Rock is the better cold-weather bed on the Nation.
Water. None. Bring all of it, plus bags for trash. An outhouse is the only facility.
Take the view seriously. Site 7 or any site on the south edge of the loop has the unobstructed line of buttes. Set the camera up before the tent and stay through the hour after sunset. The sky is the other show; see our stargazing guide for what to expect at 5,600 feet with no town for 20 miles.
Wind. The mesa edge catches it and can flatten a cheap tent. Stake everything hard, park the vehicle as a windbreak, and expect dust.
Do the park early. Drive into Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park before the tour buses the next morning; the entry fee is separate. With a second night, run the 17-mile Valley of the Gods loop and the Moki Dugway and come back to camp.
Dogs and horses. Dogs are welcome on leash; the listing includes equestrian sites. Pack out everything, including the dog’s; there is no can and the family cleans up what you leave.
Skip it if you need showers and a store: stay at Goulding’s or the KOA and come here for sunset. For free dispersed camping in the same corner of Utah, Comb Wash is an hour north; for a canyon to go with the monuments, Cottonwood Campground at Canyon de Chelly is three hours south; for a lake, Page is two hours west.
A family lot on the edge of a movie set
Monument Valley was lived in long before it was looked at. Ancestral Puebloan farmers left small dwellings and rock art in the alcoves of the buttes, and the Diné who came after them named the place Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii, the valley within the rock, and ran sheep across the sage flats that now hold the campground. The Treaty of 1868 brought the Navajo home from the Long Walk to a reservation centered on Canyon de Chelly and the Chuskas; later executive orders pushed the boundary north across the San Juan into Utah, so that the valley and the land along what is now US 163 became Navajo country on paper as well as in fact. The San Juan County line and the Utah border run through the middle of it, which is why the campground is in Utah and the tribal park entrance is in Arizona.
The outside world arrived with a trader. Harry Goulding and his wife Leone, called Mike, settled below the mesa west of the valley in the early 1920s to open a trading post, living in tents until they finished the stone building that still stands as the museum at Goulding’s. In the Depression, with the trade dead, Goulding carried a folder of photographs of the buttes to Hollywood and talked his way in to see John Ford, who shot Stagecoach in the valley in 1939. My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers followed over the next 17 years, Navajos worked as extras and crew, and the Mittens became the picture of the American West for people who had never been west of Ohio.
The 1950s brought two other kinds of attention. Uranium was mined across the southern Monument Upwarp between 1945 and 1967, including around Oljato and at Mexican Hat, where a mill ran on the San Juan; the boom built the roads and left the tailings. And the National Park Service, which had wanted a national park in the valley since the 1930s, came back to the idea. Goulding, by his own account in a 1974 oral history, lobbied the Navajo tribal council to keep the Park Service out and run the valley themselves, and in 1958 the Navajo Nation created Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, the first tribal park in the country, managed by what became Navajo Nation Parks and Recreation. It was a decision with consequences across the Nation: the Navajo would be the ones to decide who entered, what they paid and where they slept.
Camping followed the fame slowly. For decades the choices were the tribal park’s bare campground at the visitor center and Goulding’s, which added a campground as it grew into a lodge and then a resort under Navajo ownership. The View Hotel and its campground opened inside the park in the 2000s, the KOA came to Goulding’s, and families along US 163 began opening primitive campgrounds on their own land for the overflow and for people who wanted the sky more than a shower. Sleeping Bear is one of these. Its owners publish no founding date and the San Juan County tourism office lists it only as Navajo family-owned; the reviews run back years, the arrangement is a truck and a cash box, and the listing’s second pin near Oljato is the kind of error a family business makes once and never notices.
Why it matters
Sleeping Bear is the cheapest way to sleep inside the most photographed landscape in the United States, and it exists because the Navajo Nation chose in 1958 to run Monument Valley itself and let its own people profit from it. It explains the tribal park system, the Goulding story and the economics of a reservation that lives on tourism without surrendering the land to it. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: if you can carry your water and live without shade, this is the place to camp for the monuments, at a quarter of the price of the view inside the park; bring cash, take the south-edge site, navigate to Utah, and be in the tribal park at opening.