Tse' bighanilini and Hasdestwazi, "the place where water runs through rocks", and "spiral rock arches."

Glen Canyon was a beautiful, magical place that was unceremoniously flooded under the waters of Lake Powell (and I'm pretty sure John Wesley Powell would have been appalled that his name was given to the lake). Despite the gigantic eyesore of Glen Canyon Dam, there are some incredible places to explore in the immediate vicinity. One of them is Antelope Canyon, one of the Tribal Parks managed by the Navajo Nation. The two parts, upper and lower, of the canyon are called Tse' bighanilini, which means "the place where water runs through rocks", and Hasdestwazi, or "spiral rock arches."

Natural arch within Lower Antelope Canyon

Each of the canyons is worth a look. The upper canyon is justly famous for the noon hour beams of sunlight piercing the near total darkness of the deepest passages. It is also level from one end to the other. But it also requires a ride from town that includes an unbelievable race up a pure stretch of loose dune sand. And it is crowded, especially during the aforementioned noon hours when you might find yourself standing shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of other people. It's not a place for the claustrophobic.

On our recent tour, we opted for the lower canyon. It doesn't have the piercing beams of sunlight, and it is not level, requiring steps and ladders for access. But you don't have to be ferried up Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, and it tends to be far less crowded (in my three trips, anyway).

The tours of these incredibly beautiful works of nature begin beneath the shadow of the monstrous coal burning power plant just outside of Page. The coal mines are sixty miles away, but the energy infrastructure is here near Glen Canyon Dam. We were given a short safety lecture before walking down the end of the lower canyon.

It's hard to believe that such a treasure lies hidden in these folds of crossbedded Navajo Sandstone. The canyon is more than a hundred feet deep in most places, but only a few feet wide at the top. The guide politely asked us not to jump across the top of the canyon, prompting me to wonder what story was behind that rule...

Antelope Canyon drains an area of dozens of square miles, but the rushing waters of the occasional flash floods are forced to cross two ridges of Navajo Sandstone. The rock is cemented well enough to form vertical cliffs, but at the same time the sandstone is easily and quickly eroded by fast-moving sediment rich water. The result is an incredible labyrinth of looping and curving channels.

The natural curves of the canyon are accentuated by the crossbedding of the Navajo Sandstone. The Navajo formed as a gigantic sand dune sea that extended from Wyoming and Colorado to Nevada and eastern California. The crossbeds are the preserved slipfaces of the sand dunes. The dunes were present during the Jurassic Period, when dinosaurs wandered across what is now the southwest United States.

The narrow canyon can be dangerous. Storms that are dumping floodwaters upstream might not be visible from the parking lots. After a horrific tragedy in 1997 that caused the deaths of eleven people, rescue measures have been put into place, and tours aren't offered when rain threatens the headwaters region.

The canyon is full of abstract shapes and forms, and a photographer could wander for hours through the passageways (two hours to be exact, for an extra fee). Photography is allowed and encouraged by the guides, and they offer advice on shutter speeds and the like. It's been said that one can't take a bad picture here, but believe me, it's more than possible! The sharp contrast between light and dark wreaks havoc with photo framing. It challenging, but wonderful fun as well.

My favorite pictures occur where the sunlight is indirect and reflecting from above. The resulting yellow and golden hues are beautiful; the rocks seem to glow with inner light.

The texture and light are unique. If you are ever in Page, don't be afraid to put out the tour cost (between $20-35, with a $20 premium for those noontime tours in the upper canyon).

As is usual with my visits to the canyon, I have more pictures then I have words. Enjoy!

For the second time in my three tours through the lower canyon, our guide offered some beautiful flute music in the deepest part of the canyon. Here's the video:

Then it was time to go. We climbed up the last ladder into the blinding sunlight.

A Rock Outcrop, a River, and Sand flow into a Point Bar...

And the bartender said "is this some kind of joke?"

But it's not a joke of course, it's a simply stunning example of what happens when water flows over stone for a long time. What you are seeing here Horseshoe Bend on the Colorado River a few miles downstream of Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell outside of Page, Arizona.

A point bar is a real thing with rivers. When a river loops back and forth as a series of meanders, point bars form as sand ridges develop on the inside of the loop where the water flows more slowly. In the most technical sense, the sand bars in the picture above can be consider an example of the feature, although they are more familiar where rivers are flowing in flat floodplain.

It's obvious that Horseshoe Bend is no longer a flat floodplain! It may have been one at one time, but uplift of the Colorado Plateau (or the subsidence of the lands around the edge of the plateau) caused the river to speed up and start to erode downwards, forming an entrenched meander.

The approach to Horseshoe Bend is a sandy trail about three-quarters of a mile up from a parking lot about five miles south of Page on Highway 89. Although views are wide-ranging along the trail, there is barely a hint of the incredible view that awaits when one arrives at the brink of the cliff and looks down nearly a thousand feet to the river. Stunning is the only word for it.

My old camera couldn't show the entirety of Horseshoe Bend, so I was thrilled I was able to get these wider angle pictures with my new one. It's almost like looking at a petrified rainbow, although it should be said, this view is not entirely natural.

When Glen Canyon Dam was completed in the 1960s, the river was changed forever in terms of a human lifetime. Instead of the normal red silt-laden water, the river flows clear and cold (almost refrigerator cold, about 46 degrees; I can attest to this as I almost drowned in the river last year). As a result, green algae grows in the unnaturally blue river. It's beautiful to look at, but is kind of sad to consider what it should have been. Many of the native species of river life are in decline and cold-loving invasive species are thriving.

A trip-planning note just in case you are headed out to the region this summer: Highway 89 between Bitter Springs and Page was closed down by a serious slope failure along the Echo Cliffs Monocline. It may be years, if ever, before the highway will be repaired. In the meantime, the Arizona Department of Transportation has constructed a newly paved highway replacing Navajo Route 20. Although the detour is supposed to be temporary, I suspect it is permanent despite any feelings of the Navajo Nation about a new busy highway in a formerly isolated part of the reservation. There are far fewer engineering problems where the new highway crosses the monocline.

Out in America's Never Never: Barriers and the Thin Line of Civilization

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

In math, getting from Point A to Point B is hardly a problem. It's a straight line most of the time, or an arc, determined by some kind of equation. Getting from point A to point B can be a problem in a city, since buildings are often in the way, yet a good map or a vocal GPS unit gives you plenty of routes and choices to avoid traffic and delays.

Out in America's Never Never, the vast desert encompassing the Colorado Plateau and Basin and Range provinces, getting from Point A to Point B becomes a true challenge. Mountains may block the route, as the Forty-Niners found during the California Gold Rush (and earlier settlers like my ancestors, the Donners). There might be flat, open ground between one point and the other, but there might be no water. In a pre-automobile era, that was a serious problem. But out of all these examples the Colorado Plateau has one really impressive barrier: the Colorado River.

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

What's the problem? It's a fair sized river as such things go, the biggest of the American Southwest, but it is hardly a trickle compared to many rivers back east and in the Pacific Northwest. Those rivers were barriers to travel, but numerous ferries and bridges soon solved access problems a long time ago (and numerous boats used the rivers themselves as a highway). The Colorado, though, is a geologically young river. It is rapidly cutting downward through the sedimentary and metamorphic rocks of the recently uplifted continental crust, and the consequence of this is an unnavigable rapid-filled river ensconced in a deep vertical gorge along its entire pathway through the plateau country. Until the Navajo Bridge (above, left) was constructed in 1928 the only place to cross the river between Moab, Utah and Needles, CA, a river distance of 600 miles, was at Lee's Ferry, about five miles upstream of Navajo Bridge (the completion of which put Lee's Ferry out of business). The ferry was the only spot on the river whose approach was not overly complicated by vertical cliffs.

There are more bridges today, but there is still a 300-plus mile stretch between Navajo Bridge and Lake Mead at Hoover Dam where there are no crossings (except the footbridge in Grand Canyon near Phantom Ranch). Travel through the Colorado Plateau country is still complicated by this fact (and frankly, it should remain so).

The paved highways give us a somewhat false sense of easy access, as they must also surmount or circumvent barriers in the landscape formed by river canyons and vertical cliffs. As long as there is gas in the tank, a working air conditioner, and properly tuned engine, we give little thought to how tenuous our control is over our localized environment. A flat tire on a deserted road on a blazing hot day can be life-threatening. And small geological events can have far-ranging consequences.

The original plan for our trip (conceived a year earlier) was to leave the North Rim of Grand Canyon and scoot down the slopes of the East Kaibab Monocline into the Navajo Section of the plateau country. We would cross the Colorado River at Navajo Bridge, turn at Bitter Water onto Highway 89 to Page, Arizona, where we would have a slow-paced tour of Horseshoe Bend, Glen Canyon Dam, and the incredible Antelope Canyon. From there it would be a fairly quick drive to Navajo National Monument, where we would be camping for the night. It was meant to be the most leisurely day of the trip.

Oh well....

The picture above gives a hint about how geology made our day a constant exhausting race against time. The Vermilion Cliffs are a prominent part of the Grand Staircase, revealing early Mesozoic formations, including the Chinle, Wingate and Kayenta. The Chinle, at the base, is composed of easily eroded shale and siltstone, and is subject to slope failure. In the picture above, looking across House Rock Valley, the lower slopes look tilted because they are part of a huge rotational slide.

If you take a big group through this region, you will need to make the camping reservations five or six months in advance, and even at that I nearly missed getting reservations for Arches National Park and the North Rim of Grand Canyon. As such, once the schedule has been established, it can't be easily changed.

But geology can change. Highway 89 from Bitter Water to Page starts out in spectacular fashion, climbing a slope of Chinle to a big cut through the Echo Cliffs, composed of the Wingate, Kayenta and Navajo formations. The view from the upper highway is a stunning panorama of Marble Canyon, the Vermilion Cliffs, and the East Kaibab Monocline that forms the margin of the Kaibab Plateau and Grand Canyon.

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

The problem for the road engineers was getting across the Chinle slopes. The Chinle doesn't like highways on the flatlands (swelling and settling of the clays turns the best planned highways into roller-coasters), but it especially doesn't like roads on slopes.

Ultimately they chose to put the road across an ancient landslide not unlike the one in the Vermilion Cliffs above. It is especially visible in Google earth images, where a white outcrop of Navajo Sandstone can be seen well out of place next to the highway (below).

Source: GoogleEarth

In February, a portion of the old slide gave way, destroying a significant stretch of the highway. This wasn't the kind of slide that could be fixed easily, and the road will be out of service for a long time. The Echo Cliffs constitute a significant barrier to east-west travel, and between Bitter Water and Tuba City, only one dirt road crosses it. The state is in the process of paving the track, but it was nowhere near done when we passed through.

Source: Lee Allison, at http://arizonageology.blogspot.com/2013/03/adot-estimates-35-million-to-repair.html

If we were going to see the Navajo Bridge and the Colorado River, we would need to make a 140 mile detour to get to Page and our other objectives. And then backtrack around 70 miles.We barely made it to our tour appointment at Antelope Canyon at 3 PM. We got to see Horseshoe Bend, but the visit to Glen Canyon was cut very very short, and we didn't reach camp until well after dark.

Source: Arizona Department of Transportation

It was a long day...but spectacular, just the same. More later!

For more information about progress with Highway 89, check out http://www.azdot.gov/us89/

Hidden Right Under My Nose: A gem outside Page, Arizona

It must have been so frustrating to be among the first Europeans to explore the Colorado Plateau, whether a Spaniard, a Mormon, or Mountain Man. It is so easy to get around on a vast plateau, because everything is so flat. Except that this is no normal plateau. Every time an explorer came to a river, it was almost always ensconced in a valley hundreds or thousands of feet deep, with vertical cliffs separating the travelers from the life-giving water below. Even worse, the deep canyons were a serious impediment to travel. Even as late as 1928, there was only one place where a vehicle could cross the Colorado River between Moab, Utah, and Needles, California, and that crossing was by ferry (Lee's Ferry to be specific).

The rivers were just as confusing for the first geologists who explored the region, like John Wesley Powell, Grove Karl Gilbert, and Clarence Dutton. To geologists who had grown up with well-integrated river systems like the Mississippi or Ohio, these western rivers made no sense at all. The rivers crossed mountain ranges, or entered mountain ranges, only to swing around and exit the mountain range on the same side. The general landscape would slope north, yet the rivers flowed in canyons that sloped south. Huge abandoned dry channels littered the landscape, with no rivers anywhere nearby that could have carved them. It was a puzzle to be sure, but the work of Powell, Gilbert and Dutton to try and solve that puzzle led to our understanding of many basic principles of geology, including graded streams, antecedent streams, superimposed streams, base level, and isostasy. But as hard as they struggled, they could not completely comprehend the history of the Colorado River. Even today we still don't have a complete picture of how this landscape evolved.

What we do know is astounding. For nearly a billion years, the earth's crust in this region has been near sea level and stable, but in the last few million years, that same crust was uplifted en masse some 2 vertical miles. Ancient rivers were rejuvenated, and new rivers formed as headward erosion tore away at the edges of the plateau. The entire river system that may have existed for tens of millions of years had been upended, and some rivers, the Colorado in particular, ended up flowing in a totally opposite direction of the original watercourse. The old meandering rivers were trapped in their channels as the land rose, so they cut straight down, maintaining the original river loops in what are called entrenched meanders.

We were in the vicinity of Lee's Ferry during our reconnaissance journey last week. I was looking for interesting stops to add to our AAPG field seminar in July (a trip you are welcome to consider joining!). A volunteer at the Navajo Bridge Visitor Center pointed out that I might want to check out Horseshoe Bend outside of Page, Arizona. I have to admit I have never really explored Page all that much. I never got a chance to see the original Glen Canyon, and neither did anyone else except the few hundred people who had rafted the river through the canyon by the time that Glen Canyon Dam shut the floodgates in 1963. It was apparently one of the most beautiful river canyons in the world, but it now lies beneath hundreds of feet of stagnant water and silt. Page was the town where the dam workers lived during construction, and to me it represented everything that was wrong with the choices we've made in land and resource use (the giant coal burning power plant on the outskirts of town doesn't help). And with the ongoing decade-long drought, the dam and reservoir are in danger of becoming totally useless as far as their intended use as water storage and power generation.

I walked the sandy three-quarter mile trail in the hot late afternoon sun, and reached the edge of the precipice. At this point, the Colorado River is flowing through a thousand foot deep gorge cut into the thick Navajo Sandstone. It is just a few miles downstream of Glen Canyon Dam, and a few miles upstream of the Echo Cliffs and Lee's Ferry where the river briefly flows along a stretch without cliffs. It almost immediately plunges into Marble Canyon, and the Grand Canyon. Taken in pieces, like the shot above, and the one below, the canyon is scenic, colorful, and spectacular. It is always stunning to stand on (or lie on, for the acrophobics) a thousand foot vertical cliff. But taken as a whole, Horseshoe Bend is special...

From the viewpoint at the end of trail, we are standing at the outer edge of one of the entrenched meanders, so we have the spectacle of the river running in a nearly complete circle. It's hard to photograph without a wide-angle lens, but it is an incredible sight.

I was there at one of the harder moments to take pictures, though. The late afternoon sun was directly ahead of me, and it had been a dusty day, so all my pictures have lens flares galore. I can certainly imagine a serious photographer spending an entire day at this one spot, catching all the moods and sun angles.

Horseshoe Bend is accessed along Highway 89 just a few miles south of Page, Arizona. There is a parking lot on the west side of the highway. The hike is just 1.5 miles round-trip, but it is almost all in loose sand. Take water!

Antelope Canyon - A Magical Place

Just a mini-blog today, a sort of picture sequence from the road. I'm sitting in a Subway in Kanab on the way to Kodachrome Basin for our next camp. I'm investigating a trip we are conducting through the educational division of AAPG. If you want to see what we will explore, check these pictures out...Antelope Canyon on the Navajo Nation outside Page, Arizona.

The pictures almost have an almost spiritual feeling. I have to admit, however, that I did not photograph the many dozens of fellow photographers with whom we were standing shoulder to shoulder. The canyon was stunning, but crowded. Still, I love this place.



Until next time...connections are tricky to find out here!