"This place is the highlight of my US mid west holiday."
I know I've probably said this quite a few times already on my other US mid west posts, but there's always going to be a highlight of all highlights, the ultimate highlight, and this is it - the Antelope Canyon in Page, Arizona.
The Antelope Canyon is located on the Navajo Tribal Parks. The area is owned and managed by the Navajo tribe, who are the largest tribe in USA. If you want to see the Antelope Canyons, you have to join a guided tour, you can't just roll up when you feel like it, and ideally you should pre book in advance as these tours are very popular. If you look at the photos you'll know why.
There are different sections of the Antelope canyon you can see and tours are run by various operators. The Upper Antelope tour is the most popular. It's very near Page town, involves no climbing and is a mostly flat 100m walk. I'm told by my tour guide it's very beautiful. At USD120, it's the most expensive but that doesn't seem to deter visitors, making it very crowded. The Lower Canyon is a little bit further out from town, involves climbing down many flight of stairs to get into the canyon. This cost about $60 - $70. And finally there's the Antelope X which is the one I ended up going. Taking into consideration of the price, crowd, distance and scenery, my group agreed this was the best option. It's not as stunning as the others, but still more stunning than anything we've seen before. The choice between something very very stunning with lots of people in your photos, vs something stunning with no one else in your photos was a pretty easy decision.
Ok, enough talk, let's start our canyon tour.
Visitors have to make their own way to the Antelope X site. It's about 20 minutes drive away from Page, in the middle of nowhere. From here, we're taken to the canyon entrance in a shuttle bus. It's bumpy ride (it's a good thing Snowpea didn't come) on a dirt road which takes about 10 minutes as we had to go very slow.
Then we had to walk down to the canyon entrance. Despite the sun shining above us, it was an easy walk. Everyone was full of energy and looking forward to see the beautiful canyons.
There are two sections here and the 50 odd people in our group were split into 4 smaller groups each led by a tour guide. Two groups went into each of the sections and the tour guide spaced us out so we weren't too close to any other groups.
By the way, do you know why this part of the canyon is called Antelope Canyon X? It's got nothing to do with the platform X of course! The real reason is because when visitors first enter the canyon and look upwards, they will see the letter X formed by nature. Pretty remarkable, hey?
In fact these canyons are nothing short of remarkable. They are the result of million years of wind and water erosion creating the unique wavy walls. Every step we took, every corner turned, every look sideways or overhead we'd see a different hue, a different aspect. Even what we saw moments ago may have changed since due to the light coming through the canyon cracks.
Our guide was very good, he's from the Navajo tribe and was telling us about how there are actually many of these canyons around, just that they're not open to the public. He said his grandma has one behind her house. Lucky her, and him, but I guess he might be sick of seeing them every day!! Our guide also gave us some photo tips like phone camera settings, and best positions to take photos. We spent an hour in the canyons and took loads of wicked cool photos which didn't have anyone photo bombing us. It was truly a great experience and definitely the highlight of the highlight, the best of the best for me even though I ended up with dusty boots.
My first pin on the Worldmappin map. Great to see you guys up and running!