Hello, I’m sorry that I have been unable to do a post for the last couple of weeks. I have been leading a photo workshop up in Canada’s North Channel. We had a great group of participants and had a wonderful time exploring this amazing location aboard Captain Bill’s sailboat the “Little Wing”. I will be talking more about this trip in a future post.
Today however I would like to talk about another amazing destination; the slot canyons of the American Southwest. A slot canyon is a canyon that is quite a bit deeper than it is wide. As little as a few feet wide and as deep as 100 feet in some places. These canyons are formed by water that, over millions of years has carved through the soft red Navajo sandstone sculpting beautiful formations.
The slot canyon that I visited was Lower Antelope Canyon just outside of Page Arizona. The entrance is literally a crack in the earth so narrow that I had to turn sideways in order to squeeze through. Once you descend into the canyon you enter into another world. A world of amazing light and beautiful graceful curves carved into the stone that surrounds you. These canyons are not for the claustrophobic often times as I walked through the canyon I was forced to remove my camera backpack to squeeze through the narrow passages.
While slot canyons are extremely beautiful they can also be very dangerous places since they are still being formed by the water that created them in the first place. In 1997 a storm which occurred 7 miles away from Lower Antelope Canyon created a flash flood which filled the canyon with rushing water 50 feet deep, unfortunately this flood swept 11 canyon visitors to their deaths.
