Meadow in bloom for the birds and bees
The meadow glowed with tall golden sunflowers, swaths of fiery blanketflower, and shaggy lavender American basketflower.… Read More
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You’ve seen it in photos: swirling red sandstone walls aglow with light, like the inside of a conch shell or a Himalayan salt crystal lamp. Shafts of light that pinpoint, like Indiana Jones’s amulet beam, precise spots on the sandy floor. This is Antelope Canyon, as graceful as its pronghorn namesake.
Antelope Canyon conceals itself within a sandy, Mars-like landscape, on Navajo Nation land near the town of Page in northern Arizona. The canyon was high on my must-see list, and after careful planning and securing a reservation as soon as our preferred date opened, we arrived in late April for a tour. We’d chosen a tour time as close to midday as we could get, when the overhead sun briefly beams into the narrow, twisting slot canyon on cloudless spring and summer days.
To enter the canyon you must book a tour with an authorized Navajo tour company. We used Antelope Canyon Navajo Tours. They assigned us to a group of 10 to 12 people, and a guide drove us a few miles along a sandy wash in the jouncy bed of a covered pickup truck to the canyon.
That jagged crack in the rock behind our guide is the opening to Upper Antelope Canyon. At a different location, you can tour Lower Antelope Canyon, which requires descending metal ladders to reach the canyon floor.
Looking back through arabesque rock walls
And now let’s enter this cathedral of stone, sand, and light.
Water wrought this beautiful place. Desert flash floods poured into cracks in the soft sandstone mesas, carving meringue-like ridges and peaks, and ultimately creating Antelope Canyon’s rippled passageways. Floods continue to sculpt and scour the canyon today, and they can occur unexpectedly, from rain that falls miles away upstream. Eleven tourists drowned in a surprise flash flood in Lower Antelope Canyon in 1997. Safety measures spurred by that tragedy have kept tourists safe since then.
Walking through Antelope Canyon is a transcendent experience. The crested, striated canyon walls glow red, pink, and orange all around you.
Shafts of light lase the sandy floor.
Our guide snapped a few photos of us on D’s phone camera. My Nikon was sealed in a Ziploc bag with a hole cut out for the lens, my homemade attempt to keep sand out of the camera body.
Powder-fine sand hisses into canyon chambers from the slot high above and swirls delicately through the air, making the light almost tangible. Then too, it showers you with fine red grains and gets in your eyes, ears, and clothes. The views are worth the sand bath though.
A seashell glow
A scoured log rests high on a canyon wall, presumably stranded after a flash flood.
Water-sculpted light tunnels
I was awed by this place.
This is all illuminated by natural light.
D. taking a photo
Near the end of the canyon, the walls narrow, and you’re compressed into the meringue folds.
A “bench” carved by water
Sand sifting down from the world above
And then we blinked our way into bright daylight again. Looking back at the canyon crease, you might never know it was there. Was it real or a dream?
Up next: Dramatic views and wildflowers at Horseshoe Bend and Glen Canyon Dam in Page, Arizona. For a look back at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, click here.
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