Page, Arizona (not sailing)

I've decided that since I'm taking 3 months off from work and doing a lot of travelling as well as sailing, I'm going to blog my travels here as well, even if I'm not sailing (and I will be sailing on some of my travels). So this article is about my recent 3-day trip to Page, Arizona.

I've seen pictures of Antelope Canyon and have been wanting to go there for years. It's in Page, Arizona, which is right in the middle of the Grand Circle. As it turns out, I've been to all of the other sites on the Grand Circle on several other trips to the Southwest and hadn't even realized it! So, on this trip, I was able to complete the circle. :-)

I started out at 5:30am, made a quick stop at my local ATM on my way to the airport, and (although I didn't know it until I arrived in Page) left my ATM card in the ATM. Fortunately, I called the bank as soon as I realized I'd left it there. The ATM had eaten it when I didn't remove it, and they held it for me until I got back. Phew!

Page turned out to have much more to do than just the canyon. Lake Powell, which was formed when the Glen Canyon Dam was built in the late 50s, is a gorgeous lake, and the Colorado River is always beautiful. I'd been to Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam outside of Las Vegas many years ago, so I decided to check out this dam on my first afternoon in town, since I had nothing planned.

The dam is awesome! It's taller than Hoover Dam, and the tour I joined (free, I might add, thanks to our tax dollars) took us down into the dam and to the power plant in the bottom. It was a really interesting tour that included information about how the dam was built in a 700-foot deep canyon, how the town of Page appeared on the map, and what's going on with the dam and the town now.

When I got back to my B&B, I was telling the owner that I'd seen the pontoon boats on the river below the dam and wished I had time to go on one of the float trips. She picked up the phone and, within 5 minutes, I was scheduled for a float trip on my last day in town. Thanks, Bev!

That night I was exhausted from a couple of crazy busy weeks with family visiting from out of town, hosting a big BBQ in a park for my family in honor of my grandson's 2nd birthday, and finishing up my last few weeks at Google. So I went to bed early and was asleep by 8pm!

The next day was my long anticipated visit to Antelope Canyon. Eight strangers and myself met at the tour office in downtown Page and were taken in a 4-wheel drive truck out to the canyon around 11:30am—just in time to see the shaft of light streaming down into the canyon. Since the canyon is very narrow, about 1/4 mile long, and 130 feet deep, the sun only shines into the canyon around noon. It was just as amazing as all of the pictures I've seen.

We had to fight the crowds to get pictures of the rock walls without people in them. I really wish I could go there when there aren't so many crowds. I thought on a weekday not in the summer, it wouldn't be a problem. But I saw more people in that canyon than I'd seen in the whole town!

Our tour guide was great, though, about pointing out the best shots and herding the people around the corner and behind rocks to keep them out of our pictures. I did get a few great shots.

On my last day in town, I had to get up at 6am and be out of the house by 6:30 to meet up at the float trip tour guide's office downtown at 6:45. It was a great group of people - mostly photographers at some level, some professionals. We were taken down to the dam and then through a tunnel that goes right through the dam to the bottom where the Glen Canyon section of river begins.

Interestingly, we had to put all of our bags, backpacks, etc on a separate truck while we rode the two miles through the dam in the bus. I guess the security regulations since 9/11 require that. I'm not sure if they want any bombs or whatever to go separately or what. There were no xray machines or anything like that. We just had to go separately from our stuff. Also, when we got off the bus at the bottom of the dam, we had to wear hardhats on our short walk down to the river. I guess that's in case of falling rocks. I'm not sure a hardhat would save me, if one of those big boulders came careening down the side of the canyon, but whatever...


We boarded the pontoons and started our float trip down the Colorado. The river trip was lovely... very calm water, only used the motor occasionally, and got to see a lot of beautiful scenery. We floated down through Glen Canyon, Marble Canyon, and ended up at Lee's Ferry, the beginning of the Grand Canyon near Vermillion Cliffs. It was very relaxing and a lovely way to spend my last day in the area.

From Lee's Ferry, we had a one-hour bus trip back to Page, where I ate lunch, packed up my things, and flew back to San Francisco via Phoenix. All in all it was a wonderful quick trip. Please check out the rest of my images from this trip on Picasa.