Today, in perhaps the most evocative of our road trips, we drove out of southern Colorado into Utah and from there into Arizona. The landscape changed gradually from the green-topped mesa where the ancient Pueblo peoples once eked out a living through increasingly arid landscapes, though always punctuated by the vivid green of the vegetation close to the San Juan River. The region we traversed is known as the Four Corners Region. State boundaries in these parts were drawn with a ruler and the Four Corners Monument marks the only spot in the whole of the United States where four states – Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah – meet. This is also Navajo Indian land, with a Hopi Indian reservation in the middle (and an Ute bit in the north-eastern corner). The long, largely straight, roads are punctuated by an occasional concession (trading station), always Indian run. The further west we travelled the more extraordinary the geology we encountered. Stone ‘monuments’ we visited in Utah included the twin rocks at Bluff, the Valley of the Gods, and Mexican Hat. But nothing prepared us for Goosenecks. Its entrenched meanders (that’s the correct geological term) coiled around 1,000 feet (300 metres) below us, nibbling at the 300 million year-old rocks of the Paradox Formation, and it is easy to forget that at this point the river itself is some 1,200 metres above sea level. Moreover, the canyon is hidden until you are virtually upon it so that the ‘wow factor’ is intense.