Antelope Canyon is photographed so much that a Google image search turns up almost 58,000 hits. Look at most any of those photos (or this one) and you’ll see an empty metaphysical kind of place where odds seem reasonable for spotting a benevolent fairy or levitating monk--when I was there last spring I talked to an old-timer who spoke of visiting in the seventies when aside from his guide, he saw only one other person, a woman sitting cross legged in the sand playing a flute.
No longer. The day I visited there were probably 150 other gawkers, all of us drooling at the eyes over the fluted red sandstone walls. The photos look as they do thanks to the coordinating efforts of the Navajo guides who must accompany every visitor. Study an image of an empty chamber cut by a white shaft of light and it’s as asparagus is to an oak tree that there’s a group of twelve tourists gnashing their teeth around the bend being forcibly restrained by a harried guide.
My guide, the affable Gabriel, who joked and smiled most of the two hour tour, kept his cool even when a shooter in our group refused to yield her turn (“One moe, one moe, I still shooting”). The order of photographing was like an 18th century rifle brigade in combat—first, several people in front steady their tripods and make an exposure or two and then get the heck out of the way so those behind can take a turn. She refused to move, even when Gabe gently pulled her by the elbow she wrestled free and cursed him for blurring her shot. It looked like a fight might break out when the faces on the people in back missing their turns starting twisting, sputtering saliva and protest. A disturbing anti-Chinese sentiment settled in mutters over rest of the excursion.
The most interesting thing I learned is that the trademark beams of light are another thing coordinated by the guides. I guess I never bothered to think how they formed (the sun funneling through some canyon lips vortex perhaps). What happens is the guide starts tossing the fine sand, dust really, from the floor on up. He does this until enough particles are suspended in the air to catch the afternoon sun.
There’s a lower canyon as well. It has no beams, but for $20 (compared to $40 plus $6 park fee at the upper), if you have a tripod you can spend several hours roaming untethered along the longer, narrower and shallower lower reaches. It was here in 1997 that 11 tourists drowned in a flash flood when they refused to listen to their guide’s orders to leave.
