Antelope Canyon
Upper Antelope Canyon is just a couple miles outside of Page, Arizona near Lake Powell. It’s on Navajo Nation, so all tours are run by Navajo guides. Antelope Canyon is a very popular destination, because it’s beautiful and easy to get to. The narrow canyon has been formed by flash floods and is very deep and narrow.
The most famous pictures of Antelope Canyon show rays of sun shining all the way to the canyon floor, but there is only a limited time around noon where that may be visible. So we didn’t see it, but the canyon was beautiful anyway.
There are a couple different companies that run tours. During Covid-times the tours were closed for a long time and then reopened in summer 2021 on a pretty limited basis, so I didn’t do any research before booking a tour, I just took the first one I could find, which was Roger Ekis’ Antelope Canyon Tours.
In November 2021, tours were running at, I think, 50% capacity with a strict mask mandate for anyone on Navajo Nation. We were fortunate to be in a group of 6 on our tour, as I think our guide said they previously had much larger groups of 30. For our tour, we met at the office in downtown Page and were driven in an open truck to the canyon. The drive is pretty bumpy on the sandy road, but doesn’t last too long. The entire tour including transport lasted about 90 minutes.
The actual tour was an unique experience as our guide wanted to make sure we took the best photos possible, so she gave us tips on how to use our iPhones to take pictures, took some pictures for us as an example, and then also made sure we had lots of pictures of ourselves in the canyon at various special spots, like this place where the shadows look like angel wings.
Once inside the canyon, it’s very easy to walk through since the floor is flat and sandy. Our guide explained that the level of the floor can shift during a flood.
After reaching the other end of the canyon, on the way back to the truck, there was a small slot canyon nearby that we had the opportunity to walk through. And then we were transported back to Page to conclude the tour.
