A beautiful and still morning. Several colourful hot air balloons drifted by in the clear blue sky. Apparently, there was some kind of balloon festival and they certainly had perfect weather for it.
Two surprises were in store for M. Whilst R had outlined what we were going to be doing, she had no idea of the delights to come.
We drove first to Antelope Point Marina, or at least we tried to but discovered that we had been directed to a marina north west of Page, which turned out to be the wrong one - so we had to drive back through Page to find the right one!
But there was no sign of a lake anywhere, just miles of desert scrub as far as the eye could see; until we drove over the crest of a hill and there before us was Lake Powell, a bright blue lake and a marina full of massive million dollar house boats. The lake is formed by the Glen Canyon Dam and has flooded the canyons behind it. It is the second largest man made lake in America, it is 186 miles long and has 96 separate flooded canyons that branch off one side or the other.
The lake is currently about 60 ft below its capacity, but the marina, including the large stone clad buildings in the middle, all float - so they go up and down with the water level!
We boarded our trip boat just before 11:30 and set off in a group of very mixed nationalities for, what M thought was going to be, a "circular trip round the lake."
Instead of going round the lake, we entered into one of the side canyons called Antelope Canyon. You could clearly see the high water mark 60 ft above us but the cliffs on either side were two or three times higher than that. As we went further into the canyon, it got narrower and the sandstone cliffs on either side got higher. Our skipper gave a running commentary on the geology and the reasons for the many different colours of the rocks caused not just by the type of rock but also the mineral deposits left by water running down the sides.
After cruising for 20 minutes into the canyon, we reached a point where the water was only a couple of feet deep. It was so clear that you could see the bottom just under the boat. At this point, we had to back out quite a way before the skipper could turn the boat around and head back out of the canyon.
It was a journey so special that we didn't want it to end. But inevitably it did and, after thanking the skipper for a wonderful trip, we walked across the marina to where the private house boats were moored. Much to our amusement, many of them had quirky names reminiscent of English Narrowboats - the difference being the cost, shape and size!
You can actually rent houseboats here, the smallest has only three bedrooms, is 50 ft long and costs $900 per day. The largest has six bedrooms, is 75 ft long and costs $2,000 per day. Perhaps we should buy more lottery tickets!
Surprise number two followed soon after. R had said that we were going to "Ken's Tours" on the way back to Page. We had passed the site on the way up and it appeared to be a shack in the middle of the desert. So M imagined that we were going for a nature walk through the scrub desert - how wrong can you get!
Unseen from the road, in fact completely undetectable, was the fact that Antelope Canyon, the same canyon that we had sailed up in the morning, continues for several miles underground. Although this part of the canyon is liable to flash floods, under normal circumstances it is dry. Our guide, "Jimmy", clearly of Navajo origin, led us a couple of hundred yards across the desert to where a series of steps led us about 50 ft underground into the narrow confines of the canyon. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Wave upon wave of exquisite shades of pink, red, orange and yellow in the most unimaginably bizarre shapes carved by the swirling flood waters, and always above us was the azure sky.
We twisted through the narrow passages past waves of rock formations, sometimes through gaps barely wide enough to squeeze through. It took us nearly an hour to traverse the quarter mile of this part of the canyon because every time you rounded a corner, there was another amazing formation and yet another photo opportunity.
It was utterly marvellous. Afterwards we chatted to Jimmy for a while before going into the gift shop, where we discovered that "Ken" was a self taught Navajo photographer who had been taken from his home here by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, put into an American boarding school, from which he escaped several times. Eventually he had returned here to his homeland where he was captivated by the canyon and set up this unique site in the Sixties. The site is now administered by the Navajo Nation who have become very astute business entrepreneurs in recent years.
On our way back to the campsite, to our surprise we saw a "Safeway" supermarket. We went in to check that it was a supermarket - it was and we bought bread and baby tomatoes. On the road from there to the campsite, we counted no less than 10 churches of different denominations one after the other on one side of the road. Clearly, when Page was created in 1957 to service the workers building the Dam, they had not forgotten the need to minister to the soul as well as to the body!
We were back at the campsite relatively early and, for the first time on this trip, we were able to have our supper on the picnic table beside the RV by the light of the setting sun and then the waxing moon.
32,173 miles - Just 47 miles today, 1,003 miles so far for the trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment