Map of Tuba City, Arizona in 2026

In Navajo, Tuba City is Tó Naneesdizí, “tangled waters,” a name that likely refers to the many springs underground that feed its reservoirs. This map of Tuba City prints the Krenz-Kerley Trading Post, the Tuba Trading Post, the To’Nanees’Dizi Chapter House, the Tuba City Public Library, the Diné College Tuba City Center and Tuba City Elementary School, with TC Hill, the Echo Cliffs and Dotson Spring giving shape to the land.

Tuba City is a town on the Navajo Nation in Coconino County, in the Painted Desert near the Nation’s western edge.

KNOWOL made this map in 2026 and gave modern data the look of a vintage atlas. The shaded relief of TC Hill and the Echo Cliffs comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the streets were drawn from Census Bureau files. Historic sites such as the Krenz-Kerley Trading Post and the Tuba Trading Post were confirmed against the National Park Service and the National Register of Historic Places. Tuba City is the most populous community on the Navajo Nation and the headquarters of the Western Navajo Agency, and the 2020 census counted 8,072 people here, about 50 miles from the east entrance of Grand Canyon National Park and 78 miles from Flagstaff.

Tuuvi’s town

The area was home to Native peoples for thousands of years. The Spanish priest Francisco Garcés passed through in 1776 and wrote that the Hopi were growing crops here. The town’s English name honors Tuuvi, a Hopi man from Oraibi who became a Mormon around 1870 and invited Mormon settlers to live near his village of Moenkopi; the Mormon emigrants claimed to have founded Tuba City in 1872. The town’s page dates a trading post here to 1870, serving the Navajo and Paiute people who came for the springs as well as the Hopi already living nearby. Moenkopi, Mùnqapi in Hopi, sits right beside the town to the southeast; people from Oraibi founded it in 1870 as a summer farming village, and it lies in a separate piece of the Hopi Reservation. Most people in Tuba City are Navajo, and a Hopi minority lives here too.

Tuba City runs on its own clock in one small way: Arizona skips daylight saving time, but the Navajo Nation keeps it; the tribal offices and schools change their clocks, while most private businesses follow the state. The Tuba City Regional Health Care Corporation, a nonprofit, Native American-run health care corporation, runs the hospital here and employs 1,200 people. The Explore Navajo Interactive Museum opened in 2007 beside the historic trading post, the Hopi Tribe opened its Tuuvi Travel Center in 2008, and in 2023 the Native-led nonprofit Change Labs opened the Tuba City Entrepreneurship Hub, with free work space for entrepreneurs, vendors and artists and community gardens tended by local farmers.

Born in Tuba City

Jonathan Nez was born in Tuba City and served as the ninth president of the Navajo Nation from 2019 to 2023. Sunshine Sykes, born here and raised in Gallup, studied at Stanford, and in 2022 she became the fifth American Indian ever to serve on the federal bench, as a district judge in California. Aaron Yazzie, born here in 1986, is a mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has worked on the Mars Science Laboratory, InSight and Mars 2020 missions, and he has said the surface of Mars reminds him of the land near his Tuba City birthplace. Ethel Branch, born here and raised on her family’s ranch in Leupp, earned degrees from Harvard and twice served as attorney general of the Navajo Nation; during the COVID-19 pandemic her Navajo Hopi Solidarity group helped more than 5,000 families. The painter Mary Morez, born near Tuba City, blended Navajo traditions with modern art in what’s known as the “Mary Morez Style.” The model and activist Quannah ChasingHorse was born here too. Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier from Tuba City whose Hopi name was Qötsa-Hon-Mana, “White Bear Girl,” was the first Native American woman to die in combat in the U.S. military, in Iraq in 2003, and a peak in Phoenix was renamed Piestewa Peak in her honor in 2008.

Around the map

The Tuba Trading Post began in 1891, when the trader Charles H. Algert put up a two-room shed of native limestone. In 1905 Oscar Dietzman added an eight-sided building for the trader Samuel S. Preston, its walls of blue limestone from Moenkopi Wash and its mortar mixed in a vat turned by horses, and living quarters followed in 1927. The post stands on the only private land inholding in Tuba City and was listed on the National Register in 1996. The Krenz-Kerley Trading Post, nearby at 78 North Main Street, is on the National Register too. The Echo Cliffs stretch for 70 miles and rise more than 1,000 feet, the western face of the Kaibito Plateau, with the Tutuveni petroglyphs at their base. The Diné College Tuba City Center is one of the branches of Diné College, which opened in 1968 as Navajo Community College and which its page calls the first college established by Native Americans for Native Americans. The To’Nanees’Dizi Chapter House, the Tuba City Public Library, Tuba City Elementary School, TC Hill and Dotson Spring have their places on the sheet as well.

This Tuba City map makes a good addition to an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of the area. It’s made for anyone who calls Tuba City home, from Main Street to the Echo Cliffs, and KNOWOL created it in 2026 to show the town as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Tuba City map.

Sources

• Tuba City, Arizona, Wikipedia
• Tuba Trading Post, Wikipedia
• Echo Cliffs, Wikipedia
• Moenkopi, Arizona, Wikipedia
• Diné College, Wikipedia
• Jonathan Nez, Wikipedia
• Sunshine Sykes, Wikipedia
• Aaron Yazzie, Wikipedia
• Ethel Branch, Wikipedia
• Mary Morez, Wikipedia
• Quannah ChasingHorse, Wikipedia
• Lori Piestewa, Wikipedia