During a loop between Las Vegas and Moab in August 2018 around the big colorful river, here is now Upper Antelope Canyon.
A secret treasure trove of wonders
South of the great Colorado River, here is the village of Page, on a nipple hill in the middle of the bright ochre desert of Navajo country, on the northern edge of Arizona.
Here is the dam that holds the 2nd largest artificial reservoir in the USA, Lake Powell. The first is Lake Mead, downstream of the Grand Canyon on the same Colorado river.
Superb and vast site : lake Powell.
A mini-cruise at dusk is a real joy.
But the marvel is elsewhere, next door, which nothing suggests on the south-eastern slope of Page hill, except what the Navajo guides say.
However, 50 meters from the parking lot for tourists' cars, several dry toilet cabins very foul-smelling despite (or because of) the heat, scare away visitors.
Some seek their salvation behind the thin bushes nearby ; however, we will see elsewhere other dry toilets that have proven to be very correct.
But we can concede the worst, which we forget...
Because the best awaits us, not under the toilet, but a few kilometers away.
Towards the "sacred area", very organized convoys of powerful 4x4 pick-ups start at regular intervals, on a course of almost 6 km in the bottom of a dry river bed, wide, and deep of a few meters, where waters of rare and violent floods flow when they occur.
On the tray of their pick-up truck barely covered to protect themselves from the sun, passengers don't avoid the cloud of very fine sand raised by the vehicles in front.
And here is the dead-end.
A few more steps. Disembarked visitors at last enter the shadow of a very narrow and winding canyon that unfolds its enchantment when the sun is almost at its zenith.
So is also the case of another collateral neighboring canyon, shallower but just as magical.
Despite the rhythmic organization, the groups that follow each other catch up and mingle sometimes, other times cross each other in this deep hose whose clear sand floor offers a flat and winding path.
Lively and picturesque spats between Navajo guides are not uncommon.
Small unpleasentnesses quickly forgotten so extraordinary is the sight, which spontaneously snatches exclamations of surprise, enthusiasm.
In the theatricality of Bryce Canyon or the Grand Canyon, but also Canyonlands or the Arches Park, the eye embraces the horizon ; it rotates again to embrace more.
The whole panorama at more than 180° can be seen from a single point.
Here, exact opposite, it's from the bottom of a crevice - like that of a ripe pomegranate ready to burst - looking up at the narrow field of light some 25 to 30 meters above that the irresistible attraction is coming.
At least as long as the sun is close to the zenith, between 11am and 2pm.
The rest of time, the site gradually falls back into its ghostly shadows, then sinks into darkness, where only a few birds live, that have made their nest there.
No matter if the neck breaks ; the eyes remain riveted up there.
And it's the extraordinary scrolling of a natural, continuous, whimsical work of art, of arcs, curves, edges, magic fades, concavities, curled up striations as by an artist's brush.
The colors are an inexhaustible festival, burned, dazzled by the light of the heights that plays with tones of white, gold, purple, ochre, bistre, slice of ebony and powerful purple.
and often with astonishing contrasts which compose captivating abstract paintings,
a formidable and dazzling florilegium
However, the guides don't forget such particular profile of a chimney which, here, takes the shape of a heart, under which bashful lovers are photographed for their tiny eternity.
Elsewhere, the coach of a group of amateur photographers triggers a fall of fine sand, whose very reproducible effect is used for playing with the shutter speed.
The walls, which are not allowed to be touched, seem friable.
In fact, they are surprisingly hard, but not like granite.
Heterogeneous layers reflect those of sediments (marine, river, wind) accumulated gradually and then compressed over the eras for at least 550 million years, forming this today sandstone.
The site is only a tiny part of the great Colorado Plateau (300,000 km², more than half of metropolitan France), which has been raising in block, very slowly (surrection say experts) for 30 million years.
In the period of the "monsoon" here sometimes called "Arizona monsoon" (from June to August), it's difficult to imagine the power of the water streams, which represent 50% of the annual rainfall.
Water doesn't penetrate these dry soils but rips, carries away, irresistibly.
Depending on the degree of hardness of the walls, the torrents of water bounce and violently fork, dig often spiral concavities, sculpt admirable random shapes, accentuate, erase them, brush them, paint them with elegant streaks, destroy them too.
Then, in the long and dry period that follows, the rest is a matter of light, quickly jubilant.
The opposition is total between the Diluvian hell (from the video Lower Antelope Canyon Flood Page, Arizona - YouTube) seen necessarily from the set, and the enchanted visions from the inside.
After millennia, this narrow hose has finally deepened, flood after flood, over a distance of some 400 meters across the plateau, and a width that varies between 1.50 and 3 meters.
The resplendent height reaches 25-30 meters.
After the rains, waters of the Upper Antelope Canyon flow to the nearby Colorado River, now to the Lake Powell reservoir. Where also ends another river, the "Lower Antelope Canyon", more difficult to cross than its upper brother.
So is the treasure, buried like a Navajo cassette, of Upper Antelope Canyon.
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Woe however to those who, inattentive to the weather forecast, or even surprised by their suddenness, let themselves be caught up in this terrible turmoil, like these seven French hikers of a group of eleven, all victims of such a disaster in August 1997 in the "Lower Antelope Canyon".
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