Friday morning (May 15th) we headed out to our re-scheduled tour of Upper Antelope Canyon first thing. We thought it might be canceled again since it had been raining more during the early hours of the morning, but fortunately when we arrived to the tour place at 8:00, the tour was still on. We watched a hoop dancer while we waited for our tour to leave.I am really glad we were able to do the tour, and the canyon was truly stunning to see.
Our tour guide pointed out a number of rock formations within the canyon that were shaped to look like something widely recognizable, such as the heart below and the face of Abraham Lincoln below that.
 |
| Canyon walls leave a heart shaped opening |
 |
| Canyon rock shaped like the face of Lincoln |
I am sure it would not have been difficult to find multiple other formations resembling something else in the wildly shaped walls of that canyon.
It is no great wonder that photographers love this place; the possibilities for amazing shots there seem endless.
Antelope Canyon got its name based on the fact that antelope did once run through it. However, that doesn't happen any longer since the Indians in the area killed off all the antelope that use to be there. I doubt they would run through often now anyway with all the tourists that fill the place.
At the end of our tour, our guide played on his flute for us as we all came out of the canyon, which was fun to hear.
While I loved seeing the canyon, I was rather disappointed with the tour. It was so expensive for what we got. The canyon was crowded with other tourists, and we felt rushed through everything. We couldn't possibly hang back to take a picture or look at something more closely because there was always another group right behind us pushing us forward. In fact, I was amazed that there was a brief second in which I was able to get a picture of Nate at the end of the canyon without anyone else in it!I was further frustrated by the poor lighting. We had originally reserved our tour for Thursday at the peak lighting time, during which light streams in shafts to the canyon floor. Instead, the light that we did have Friday morning was often obscured and darkened by clouds. We wouldn't have been able to see the light shafts at that time of day anyway, but it was much more difficult to get good pictures at all in the low light conditions we had.
After our tour, we returned to our place, packed up our things, and checked out. Earlier that morning we had called the Lower Antelope Canyon tour place to see if we would be able to do that tour sometime that day. We were informed that those whose tours had been canceled from the day before could come at 12:30 to see if it would be possible to do an afternoon tour since the morning was being reserved for those who had reserved Friday tours previously. This left us with an odd amount of time to kill before we would know whether doing our tour would be possible or not. We decided to visit the Carl Hayden Visitor's Center and dam, and see if we could do one of the tours there.
As it turned out though, the dam tours were full, so we just spent our time wandering the visitor's center museum and gift shop and walking out on the bridge over the dam.
At 12:30 we drove out to the tour place to see if we could see the lower canyon, but were informed that it was closed for the rest of the day. Indeed, the skies had become increasingly overcast, and as we drove off to go on a hike we had planned, it started raining on us.
We spent the afternoon hiking Bucktank Draw to the Birthday Arch. As things turned out, we didn't hike by ourselves as originally planned; we hiked with a random hitchhiker we met at the trailhead. There wasn't actually any official parking area, or even any other indications from Hwy 89 that the trail was there. We just had to pull off onto the side of the road where the trail started, and the hitchhiker happened to be at their at the same time we were. We told her we could take her to Kanab after our hike, and then she opted to hike with us instead of waiting. She was pretty nice, although I was surprised that she wanted to do a hike when she had already been walking along the highway all day.
 |
| The Birthday Arch |
The trail mostly just went along a wash. There isn't an actual trail to the arch; hikers just have to make their way to it after they see it from the wash. We had fun taking pictures there. I got a great one of Nate clicking his heels together.
While Nate was taking a picture of me, we suddenly heard the sound of large beating wings. We looked up to see a huge bird of prey (maybe an eagle?) flying down from a nest sitting in the crevasse just to the side of the arch.
 |
| The huge bird that was nesting next to the arch |
After leaving the arch, we headed to the cliffs on the other side of the wash to see a tiny slot canyon. It was very short, but it had very tall walls. Actually, I believe went on a bit more, but it looked like climbing up the back to get to the top of the drop off would have been nearly impossible. Nate tried briefly in any case.
 |
| Our hotel's swimming pool |
Saturday morning we embarked on one last adventure before heading home: we rode the Kanab Zip Line. That was a lot of fun, although it was also a lot colder than I would have liked. There were four zip lines in total. The last two were double zip lines, so Nate and I did them at the same time. He filmed me as we went across the first of these, and we held hands and kissed in the middle of last one (something the guys running the place said they had never seen before).
 |
| This is the starting point of the first zip line |
 |
| Overview of the zip lines |
No comments:
Post a Comment