Antelope Canyon

During my recent trip to Arizona, I had a chance to visit Upper Antelope Canyon. I was with my family, and we drove out to one of the two (we saw two, maybe there are more) places to pay for a guide to take us to the Canyon. There were hundreds of people there, even though it was pretty cold. They put nine people apiece in the dirty, run-down SUVs, one driver and the rest tourists. Then our driver joined the other drivers in a dash down the highway to the turn onto a dirt road, which quickly gave way to a dry stream bed. There was at least a dozen other SUVs, all going the same direction, all plowing through sand and gravel and ruts on the stream bed. The truck tires would fall into ruts and follow, like a train on a track, leading to sudden sideways motions. I held on to the seat under me to keep from hitting my head on the ceiling when we hit bumps. Finally we reached the entrance and parked next to the other SUVs that were already there.

We got out into the cold and entered the canyon as a group. The floor is sand; the canyon is narrow enough to touch both sides at once in many places, and it was crowded. The crowds actually helped because we had to wait for the groups ahead of us to go through. I think our guide would have rushed us through faster if he could. We could sometimes see the sky, but most of the time we simply had wavy sandstone all around. I knew when we started that we wouldn't have the summertime shafts of sunlight reaching the floor, and it was dark in most of the canyon. It even seemed cave-like in some places.

The crowd was milling about, with each group's guide showing features and advising people on photography subjects. The guides know the places to shoot and how to work just about any camera or cell phone. Gigabytes of space were being consumed each minute with all the photography that was going on.

I was pleasantly surprised after the fact that my camera functioned well. My DSLR is terrible at high ISO settings, with awful noise. But I had no choice: I was quickly at 1000 ISO because that was the only way I could get fast-enough shutter speeds. I used a 24mm f2.8 lens, and I'm happy with that choice over the other lenses in my bag. That canyon is one subject where the noise is there in the images, but nearly impossible to see. The guide leading the group behind us was (annoyingly) using a green laser pointer to show things to his group. Some of my photos have green lines as a result.

So we walked through, taking pictures with my DSLR and all of our phones, and eventually we reached the other end, which opens up into a wide, dry stream bed just like the one at the entrance. We waited there a few minutes, and then pressed through the crowd, back through the canyon to the parking area, stopping not even once. Then it was back in the SUV, racing the other SUVs on the dry stream, holding on to the seat again, and eventually back onto the highway and back to the place we started. We got out, said goodbye to our guide, and then he loaded up his next group to do it again.

Enough with the story... Here are the pictures.

Laser Pointer Trail

The crowd