Tag Archives: Chief Tsosie

Pokin at Antelope Canyon

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Pokin came back at 1:00pm and we met her at the gift shop.  She looked pretty frazzled.

“Place is nice, but my heart is pounding!”

The way the canyons work is that several groups have rights into the canyons.  They shuttle you in mostly open air trucks down a bumpy dirt road to the entrance.  Once there, you have a bit over an hour to take photos (after the transit time); less if you don’t do the photo tours.

Well the canyons are crowded!  And the light beam show is fleeting.  So her entire experience was what her guide Rob described as “speed shooting”.

Run in, don’t have time to set up, take some photos quickly, run to the next spot, take some photos, run back to the first spot.  Repeat until your hour is up and then go and delete all the photos with arms, legs, heads and people in it.

The place is cool, the pictures look neat but I’m sure glad my best bear bud and I skipped out on the experience!

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At least she got to go with a photographer friend she met earlier in the day.

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Not going to Antelope Canyon

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I mentioned we’d learned that the Antelope Canyon (which has an upper and lower section) isn’t publicly accessible.  It’s on Navajo land and in fact different families have rights to the different canyons.  You have to pay a permit fee, a guide fee, a licensing fee if you want to take photos and possibly sell them, and you have to sign up for a tour in order to go.

Well we didn’t know that, so Pokin spent a few hours on the phone calling up tour companies.  Most of them were already booked up, but eventually she found a tour with one spot left.  A two hour photography tour with Chief Tsosie of the hour Upper Canyon for $80 at the 10:30 time slot.   There was also a $43 regular non photography tour too.  Upper Canyon is famous for the beams of light that shine into the canyon at certain times, and as a result it’s crazy busy there.  Being crammed into small confined spaces with tonnes of other tourists seemed like the last thing my best bear bud wanted to do, so we wished Pokin good luck and headed towards lower canyon where there were rumours that you could go without a guide.

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Which turned out not to be true.

Well it’s true that you could go to lower canyon if you were a photographer.  With an SLR.  And a tripod.  No, your fancy Leica won’t work because they don’t accept mirrorless cameras.  So not surprisingly they didn’t accept our cell phone camera as sufficient equipment.  And unfortunately we missed the guided tour departure by about 5 minutes so seeing the Antelope Canyon just wasn’t happening.

Off to find something else to do!