Tag Archives: Lower Antelope canyon

A Little Glimpse Of Gold

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When you walk through lower Antelope canyon you pass through various ranges of color. Sometimes you’re in a darker area where the purples are predominant, other times you come into a bright area where every shade of orange and red and yellow are on display.

This is one of those areas. The canyon floor is a little wider here than other places and the sun was cooperating so the result is an open airy feeling, that is until a cloud passes in front of the sun, then it gets real dark down here in a hurry. When you’re 100′ or more under ground you want the sun to illuminate the passages. There are no lights down here other than the sun and your enthusiasm.

Sometimes the colors seem to try to outdo each other and when that happens, magic happens. Be quick when you see this type of color arrangement present itself as this is not the norm down here. However if you wait a moment you’ll get something just as spectacular because that’s the canyon’s job. Show the colors and plenty of them.

Tsunami

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Many, many moons ago, before people or any living thing was alive, the earth moved. It did not just move it convulsed. It was hot, the very foundation of what would be land was a molten sea of stone and storms of incredible size raged across the surface of the planet creating waves of unbelievable height. Since there was nothing solid to hurl themselves against they crashed into each other, plumes of stone rising into the air as if trying to escape the conflagration of which they were a part.

There was no escape. Everything was held to the planet by an invisible force which gave the illusion of freedom, seeming to allow the waves to rise to nearly unimaginable heights to escape, but actually keeping them bound forever to this new earth. The tempests raged on constantly over time that could not be counted. Eons of thrashing, and compressing, compacting, contracting, tossing spumes of molten rock impossibly high into the air, sending what would someday be mountains racing across the molten seas surface, the storms raged on endlessly.

But as in all things there came a time when even this constant turmoil had to cease. Through mechanisms that we think of as rapid but actually took millennia the seas of stone began to subside. Heat was lost and the stone began its slow process of cooling and congealing until at one point, nearly impossible to believe after the unending struggle, it stopped. It was over.

On the surface of this new landscape other forces were at work, wind, erosion, freezing and thawing, all conspiring to worry the naked rock away and create the terra firma we see today. But underground it was a different matter. Since the surface above protected it from the same forces that were changing the landscape, it stayed much as it had during its birth. Openings were left on the surface that would eventually allow people to enter this subterranean world and get a small glimpse of what it must have looked like when these formations were alive and moving. Not the scale, or the immensity but a snapshot as it were, of the tsunamis and magnificent waves that roared across the openness that was the world then.

Here is a brief glimpse of a Tsunami in stone.

See This ?

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See this? If you were to go over to a wide place that you could fit into and shinny yourself down a hundred feet or so to the bottom, this is what you’d see.

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Just underneath your feet is this. Antelope canyon in Arizona. Lower Antelope canyon to be precise. Bet you’d a never thunk it. You could shinny down to this if you were one of those guys who was really good at shinnying but you don’t have to. At either end of this canyon are ladders that will take you down to the bottom and save all that work.

However for the less adventurous of us where shinnying won’t work due to the amount of comfort starches packed on over the winter you can go over to the edge, lie down and stick your head down into that crack as far as you’re able to, look as hard as you can and you won’t see this. Not a bit of it. Be careful you don’t slip and fall in and get like, wedged so you have to gnaw your arms off or something  to get out. You have to go down inside and look up to see these colors.

That’s because the color doesn’t happen unless the light hits it, and the light hits it because at certain times of day depending on the time of year the sun is directly overhead just right and the light shines all the way down to the bottom of this canyon and makes color. It’s like that old question “If there’s color in the darkness can you see it?” and the answer is no. Not unless you’re one of those freaky bat-like things that can see in the dark but even then you wouldn’t see these colors because those bat-like things see in an entirely different spectrum than us, infra-red or blue or orange, whatever, and their colors are weird. I told you they were creepy.

Seeing as how it’s Friday and I know some of you are still in the depths of winter I thought you might like a little pick me up. Just to remind you that there are other colors in the world besides white and grey and black. Antelope canyon, bright, warm colors, no shinnying needed, and just waiting for you. So if you’re really tired of winter, my recommendation is just to run away, quick, don’t think about it, just do it. Antelope canyon’s a good place to go. See you there.