(FORTUNE Magazine) – Though most Navajos use their hogans for religious rituals, a handful are renting out the traditional octagonal log-and-dirt huts as a native twist on the B&B.

It's travel stripped down to the essentials. To reach the Two White Rocks Navajo Hospitality hogan, above, near Window Rock, Ariz., you drive 172 miles deep into the 17 million-acre Navajo Nation's back country. Dinner is served alfresco under the pinons. Entertainment might range from a sweat lodge to a blessing ceremony with the "elderlies." (Various aunties are happy to translate the Navajo language of Dine.) Your call: Sleep on a bed or on a sheepskin on the earth floor of the hogan (pronounced HO-wahn). A stove provides heat, and there's no electricity or running water.

What visitors lose in amenities they gain in quiet, a thick blanket of stars, the sound of howling coyotes by the storytelling campfire. "You walked past your rental car, but it didn't exist anymore," recalls Ellen Pietrowitz, president of L-E-M Plastics in Wallington, N.J., and a guest at Two White Rocks. "It was just you, the trees, the rocks, the earth, and splendor."

--Michelle Pentz