So where are all the Antelopes? Antelope Canyon May 26th 2010

Wednesday May 26th 2010

Note: All these pics were taken with my Motorola Droid Google Phone..

Imagine you are a nine year old Navajo girl and you are out for a stroll some eighty years ago. You remember what it was like then. No internet, no Google, no YouTube and of course no face book.

This cute little girl (all Navajo girls are cute in 1930) wanders down a wash and discovers a tiny opening in the red sandstone cliffs on the sides of the wash. In she goes, and like Alice dropping into the rabbit hole, she enters Wonderland. Bright sunlight streams down the sides of the narrow canyon like orange colored lasers illuminating the sandstone and embedded crystals. The fine dust in the air glows. She looks up and the stone above is shaped like orange and red corkscrews reaching the top some fifty feet above. The shapes of the narrow canyon take many forms, a bear, giant hands, and a man with a beard. Would anyone ever believe what she had discovered?

Fast forward almost eighty years and here I am in her canyon, Antelope Canyon, just outside Page Arizona a few miles from Lake Powell.

The trip from Phoenix took nearly four hours but went quickly and was as beautiful as ever. Accompanied by my cousins, Allan and Sheila from Israel, this was an opportunity to share our travels through Navajo Country. I never tire of this ride, the San Francisco Peaks covered with snow outside Flagstaff, the Painted Desert and the Vermillion Cliffs. These five days upcoming through Northern Arizona and Southern Utah will be “eye candy” for all of us.

We arrive in Page Arizona and wait for our Navajo “guide” to take us to the canyon, about twenty minutes outside of town. All shapes and sizes of people are waiting to board our open truck. Most are non American. Understandably, this part of the West has much appeal for those foreign visitors (guests) wanting to see the beauty they have often watched in our movies. It does amaze me, however, that so many Americans choose destinations outside the USA before ever experiencing the natural beauty that we have right here within our borders.

We board this open truck. A few seat belts are there for display. None work. Our driver and our guide is a very pleasant and attractive Navajo woman in her early thirties. By the way she drives however, I am sure she thinks she is Danica Patrick, the famous, beautiful, Indy Race car driver. Sitting in this open truck, with the wind blowing so hard I can hardly open my eyes, it feels like she is going 100 miles an hour. Once we reach the sandstone wash that leads to the canyon she proceeds to put the truck in four wheel drive and we slide and spin our way to the canyon entrance.

Even though you cannot get to the Canyon without a Navajo guide, the place is very busy. We enter the canyon with lots of other people including a contingent of Japanese who are all wearing surgical masks! The canyon is very narrow, in some places as narrow as ten feet across, but even with all the people inside, the place is magical. At one point we enter a “room” where dust is dropping from above in a fine illuminated mist and it covers us with a layer of orange dust. We all experience some bit of anxiety with all the people in this narrow space and a German couple in our group has to turn back because they are feeling so anxious from their feelings of claustrophobia. But we all press on and exit the canyon on the side where the water enters and carves this magnificent natural wonder. This is not a place you want to be in when flash floods race down the wash and enter the canyon with the force that has carved all these openings and shapes in the sandstone.

Returning to the canyon for the walk back to the truck, the crowds have disappeared and it is quiet and peaceful inside. This is clearly the way to experience Antelope Canyon. I stop to imagine what that young Navajo girl might have experienced when she discovered Antelope Canyon so long ago. She must have thought she was in a dream, unless of course, she had read Alice and started looking for a talking rabbit that was late for a very important date!