June 17th Horseshoe Bend

June 17th Horseshoe Bend

Today we are on our way to Horseshoe bend and the Antelope Slot canyon in Page, Arizona. When you leave GC, there is nothing- for hours. Well, actually it was an hour and a half, but it still felt like hours. We left the Kaibab national forest and headed north toward our destination. We stopped at a place that didn’t have a name other than “scenic view” to see a small canyon that had a dry river bed in it. It was a pretty little canyon and one could fall to their death if not careful. There are no signs warning that the edge of the rock that you were standing on is the cliff with nothing beyond it. It gave us the heebie-jeebies. Another heebie-jeebie moment was horseshoe bend. As you can imagine, is a river that makes a horseshoe shape bend in the landscape. It is another “walk to the ledge and stare straight down” place, as if it was saying “stay away from me lucky charms!”

Now, it’s storey time. So, Aaron and I drive to Page, ate lunch and looked into getting a tour of the “antelope slot canyon.” We decide on the cheapest place and signed up. This place we went was accommodating 30 Chinese tourists, a French couple, a German family, a guy from southern California, and us. Since they needed to keep the Asians together for translating purposes, the rest of us rode in their suburban. The tour uses Navajo tour guides because the slot canyon is on the Navajo Indian reservation. Our guide was a little woman, about 5’0’’ with a piercing loud tour-guide voice. She was driving the suburban with the seat pulled all the way up to the steering wheel as she told us a little history about Page and the Navajo reservation. It’s only a five minute drive to where we entered “the rez” and she drove the car through a limited access entry point. All of the sudden, we were in sand about one and half to two feet deep, which is in a flash flood plane. There was no road, you just made it as you went along, which ended up being very bumpy. The two small German kids thought it was fun. We rode for about five minutes and then came to a wall with a bunch of other suburbans around it. We made it! Aaron was getting his camera out, along with the other people, and the guide starts touching every ones cameras and telling them to set the ISO to 400. Ok, she’s just being nice and telling people what is best for the lighting conditions (the slot canyons are very dark). Then, for the next forty-five minutes, we hear “stand here!” “Take this picture” “Don’t get the sunlight in your picture” “Take your family’s picture here!”, “Let me take this picture for you!” I kept expecting her to say “No soup for YOU!” The poor single guy from CA had his camera taken from him at least ten times for her to take pictures for him. Luckily, she never came near Aaron’s camera. At the end of the tour, she told us to turn around and go back thru the canyon and she would be right behind us. The German guy cracked a joke about her prodding the cattle heard back to the car. Alas we made it through the tour. One the way back to our cars, we found out that the German family is actually from MI and are moving back to Germany. They are also going on the same “tour of the west” as we are. Such a small world. We left Page and went on to Bryce Canyon to catch the sunset and begin the next leg of the journey.

p.s. pictures coming soon!