Quick Goodbye to Page

We love this area, and we love this park overlooking Lake Powell.  The stark contrast between the vermilion cliffs layer and the white cliffs layer against the beautiful blue of this lake.  It's hard to describe just how blue this lake is.

We're on to bigger and better things, but it's always a little hard to leave a beautiful place. 

Cathedral Canyon

This is a lesser known canyon - well anything outside Antelope is lesser known, but still a beautiful canyon.  This is a lovely simple, short canyon with huge walls that echo like a great cathedral.  I wanted to sing, but for the benefit of any audio pollution, I restrained myself and took pictures only!

This is my first effort at HDR photography (high dynamic range)

The entrance is like many slot canyons and beckons some great photography ahead.

Even though this is a short canyon the walls are enormously high.

 

The other amazing thing about slot canyons is that you can get some pretty unique lighting....here's a tree back lit with a dark background - couldn't resist the contrast. 

This was a very small canyon, but I loved it for the acoustics and of course the beautiful sandstone.

Water Holes

Water Holes is not a well-known slot canyon, but touted as one of the finest in the area, and that's saying a lot in the land of slot canyons. It's on Navajo Tribal land so a permit must be obtained from the Navajo before you hike the canyon.


But here's the thing about Water Holes. It starts out VERY boring....it's a little tricky to get into, but once you follow the stacked rocks it's not all that hard.  It may seem a little scary, but I've seen some pretty physically disabled people get in and out of it, and Walt and I did it with our heavy tripods and cameras which is about as hard as being physically disabled (we're probably mentally disabled trying to bring all that stuff into the canyon - but, oh well....)

So we're walking along and it's boring.....or at least I consider this boring for a slot canyon......

 This is NOT a slot canyon....it's a slot canyon wannabe.  After about 3/4 mile, I'm thinking this is a joke and  not really all that big of a deal and so glad I did not cancel our slot canyon reservations at Antelope Canyon.

So I start trekking down the road to the trail head thinking Walt can just go traipse around all over kingdom come and I'll be back that the car resting...and of course laughing my ass off.

So a couple of other hikers in the canyon caught up to me and told me that they had met Walt in the narrows.  I'm like what narrows?  No one said anything about any narrows!!!  So I tuned around and yes, I re-hiked he 3/4 mile...again thinking the ice cream that night was going to taste mighty good.

This is looking a little better but still not a real slot canyon.  But what does make this one interesting is the sun.  What makes real slot canyons so special and particularly in the Page, AZ area or in the Paria River area is that they are in the Vermilion Cliffs which is one of the steps of the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.  The cliffs are called Vermilion cause they are red and mostly made of Navajo sandstone.  What makes this sandstone so special is that it has quartz in it which reflects the light.  What we photographers are looking for is not the sun on the canyon wall, we are looking for the reflection from the other side that is lit.  This shows this perfectly.  The left side is reflecting the light from the right side.  The right side has either no light (in shade and therefore not much reflected from the left side) while the left side has full reflection from the right sunlit side, and see the color on the left - that's what photographers are looking for.

 Here is a real slot canyon.....this is all about the light reflection and when the canyon walls are close there's lots of beautiful reflection going on.  This is the beginning of the Narrows in Water Holes Canyon. 

 From here it gets prettier and prettier.

 Even when there's light further down, it's really remarkably colorful.

Walt and I were both shocked at how well this little unknown canyon is lit and how beautifully it photographs.

It's easy to walk through.  There are some parts of the Narrows that are closer than others, but most of it is easy to walk through.

  The hard part was getting out with all our tripods and equipment.  I did a lot of the five point descending (two hands, two feet, and one butt), while a lot of crawling back up.

The ice cream that night tasted mighty fine!

Lower Antelope Canyon

This is the lessor known, and probably lessor visited of the Antelope Canyons, but I highly recommend this canyon (as well as the upper location).  They are two entirely different canyons.  The lower Antelope Canyon is a classic example of a beautiful slot canyon.  It's easy to traverse (with install steps to get up and down and gets to a very deep part of the canyon. 

It's two most known photos are the eagle:

And the maiden:

This is the way my hair looks every morning!!!

The canyon is filled with beautiful shots one after the other.  Walt did HDR (high dynamic range) photos which take a while to process, but here are some of the rest of mine from this beautiful canyon

Unbelievable aren't they.  And remember this is the lessor know Canyon. 

The canyon is on Navajo Native American Tribe land, and you will need a permit from the Navajos, as well as a guide.  You can do the standard tour for penance or the photo tour for a very reasonable price.  For the photo tour you will need a DSLR or SLR and a tripod to get some of the great settings for the light.  Armando our guide (he's a really sharp dresser)....

 knew how to work everyone's camera and even knew some settings on mine that I didn't know it could do.  Pretty impressive.  It doesn't take anytime at all to get a reservation online or by phone (check out the link to get the phone information). 

The next slot canyon on our three-day slot-canyon extravaganza is even lesser know Water Holes.

The Colors Are Always Beautiful

So Walt has his camera out messing around with it before we take on the slot canyons and this is the result.

 

This is the view outside our RV every evening when sit down to enjoy the evening.  The water is almost artificially blue and the cliffs are almost artificially red. Coming into Lake Powell at the park entrance can seem like some other-worldly experience because the water is so blue after driving through such arid climate.  

What always amazes me as an artist is the natural occurrence over and over of opposites in the color wheel.  In this case these opposites:

 

In this case the rusts of the earth and the blue of the sky and the aqua of the lake.  There are several things here that work in favor of this - the deep lake which makes it extra blue, and the red earth which makes for a super contrast showing off the blue even more and the blue showing off the red even more.  

In the days to come, we visit a double whammy of photographers dreams so I'm sure we will have plenty to post tomorrow!!!

On The Road Again

It's been too long and after a few mishaps and minor glitches we have the old lady (and that does not refer to me thankyouverymuch!) up and running an d we're off with a bang to Page AZ. Page AZ you say?...what's there?  Well it's practically the slot canyon capital of the world. And what are slot canyons?  They are these cool canyons that have been carved out of stone by years of erosion by water and usually but not always in beautiful sandstone colors.

 Traveling out I40 is really amazing as the terrain.  Each state seems to have it's own contour....out in western Oklahoma - it's really really flat.

 

Which makes for these kind of skyscrapers!

 And the minute we hit the TX/NM border the mesas start to appear.

And the out of NM into AZ the sky seems to get bluer and the earth turns amazing colors.

 

This is the beginning of the Grand Staircase which shows the 6 steps of the staircase - from top to bottom: Pink Cliffs (Bryce NP), Grey Cliffs, White Cliffs, Vermilion Cliffs (Kanab, UT), Chocolate Cliffs and the Grand Canyon.

You can not tour this part of the world and not get interested in geology.

 

A quick trip

From about October to the end of the year, any traveling around in the state is fun and usually colorful if not filled with migrating birds, animals getting ready for winter (either rutting or feeding) and trees in colorful display.

Even this far into fall there are beautiful landscapes to be had:

The Southern Plains in the fall plants a crop of winter wheat which this time of year is usually a green velvet fuzz on the ground.

Traveling down the road, it's impossible to miss the contrast between the green velvet fuzz and the harvested corn, sorghum crops fields.  The light yellow in contrast with the deep green makes a gorgeous contrast.

 

And there's nothing prettier than the frost on the crop early late fall/early winter morning.  This provides not only a second crop for the farmers but also cattle can be run on these fields which goes a long way toward sustaining a winter herd of stock. 

 

But that's not the only thing out in the fields.  After a crop is harvested, there are the inevitable grain left on the field.  There is no way to  gather all the grain, and certain animals know that and are there to aid in the gathering of that grain.

In the morning sun, the beautiful colors of pheasants are gorgeous, as they are roosting in a tree next to a recently harvest field.

They are naturally skittish and as I walked closer and closer, they all began to fly away.

 

They are just as beautiful in flight as they are in the sun!   We continued to see a lot of them in the field, but never as beautifully displayed as here.