Antelope Canyon is a slot canyon on Navajo land near Page, in northern Arizona, so narrow that its sandstone walls almost touch overhead, folded and curved like poured water, and sunlight reaches its floor only as a single shaft around midday. The canyon was cut by flash floods: water pouring off the plateau into a crack in the rock, scouring it wider and smoother with every storm over thousands of years, and the walls carry the shape of the water that made them, in bands of orange, red and purple that change with the light. It comes in two sections. Upper Antelope is a flat walk through a corridor at ground level, wide enough for the crowds and famous for the light beams, which in high summer, on clear days around midday, drop through the openings above and stand on the floor like solid columns of dust; Lower Antelope is tighter and deeper, entered down steep flights of bolted steel stairs into a passage where the walls press close and twist overhead, and it is walked in single file.
Both sections are seen only with a Navajo guide, since the canyon lies on the Navajo Nation and is sacred to it; the guides point out the shapes in the rock, a heart-shaped window of sky where the walls almost meet, and tell what the place means, which is the part most people forget to ask. The canyon carried two Navajo names, one for each section, long before the English one, which is an outsider's afterthought for the pronghorn that once grazed here. The stairs and the cargo nets rigged overhead are not conveniences but flood equipment: in 1997 a storm miles away sent a wall of water through Lower Antelope and killed eleven people, and the canyon closes whenever rain threatens anywhere on the plateau. The canyon lies a few minutes from Horseshoe Bend and Lake Powell, and it is booked weeks ahead in summer. Antelope is a canyon shaped like water, and the water still comes.