Horseshoe Bend & Antelope Canyon

After yesterday, this morning was off to a slow start. Katie and I pretty much limped down to breakfast after rolling out of bed. Once we started moving though things were feeling better.

We pretty much had the whole day to do some touristy sightseeing. Page itself is a pretty neat city. Everything was less than a 5 minute drive from our hotel. It essentially is surrounded by nothing but desert, but provides access to the beautiful blue waters of Lake Powell.

First stop of the day was Horseshoe Bend. The parking was very limited, but we got lucky and snagged a spot. It’s probably about a half mile walk to the bend. When we arrived there was a least a couple hundred people there.

The bend itself is massive. I have seen many pictures before, but nothing compares to experiencing this in person. If you can see in the image above there is a white spec at the bottom. That is a boat. It helps give some scale as to how massive this bend actually is.

It’s pretty freaky because there are no real safety barriers protecting tourists from falling hundreds of feet to the bottom. The foreign tourists were making us really nervous climbing out to the cliffs while wearing flip-flops.

After that we went to go check out the Glen Dam. It sits on the Colorado River just before Lake Powell and spans the entire canyon. We got to walk across the bridge and also enjoyed some sweet views from the visitors center.

From there we headed to our tour of the Lower Antelope Canyons. These slot canyons sit on Navajo land and you must book a guided tour in order to see them. As we expected, there were tons of tourists. I think we were the only one from the states.

Our tour was the last one at the day starting at 4:15pm. There was a group of about 20 of us along with our guide. The tour started at the deepest section of the canyon and we worked our way up. To get to the bottom they had metal staircases in place.

Once we got to the bottom it was pretty spectacular. Everywhere you looked was like a Windows screen saver. Our guide was also awesome. He pretty much took everyone’s phone and hooked us up with the ideal camera settings for taking pictures in the canyon. He knew where every photo op spot was and had a system for getting individual shots for all of our group.

The canyon itself is really cool. There are so many different features along the slot. Apparently quite a bit of maintenance goes into making the slot canyon available for tourists. Our guide was saying that about 10 to 20 times a year the canyon will flood, and they have to go down and clean it out. It pretty much involves going down with buckets and pushing the water down the slot. After that they dump large amounts of sand from the top so it is easy for tourists to walk on.

Apparently if we had been on a tour from 10:00am to 1:00pm we would have seen the light beams that shine down from the top. Our guide showed us a video though. They basically take a handful of dirt and throw it up in the air. As it settles, you can see a gleaming beam of light shining down from the top.

Once we got out of the canyon we looked back at where we had come from. You could hardly tell there was anything there at all.

To end the day we had some dinner at Big John's BBQ. They had outdoor seating at live country music everyday at 6pm.