Antelope Canyon is carved into solid rock by water that is almost never there — the flash floods of a few summer storms, which can fill the narrow passage from wall to wall in minutes. The stone is Navajo Sandstone, Jurassic dune sand turned hard; for countless seasons monsoon runoff has funnelled off the desert above, picking up grit and scouring the walls into smooth, flowing curves that seem to pour downward like frozen water. It lies on Navajo Nation land just outside Page, in northern Arizona, and the Navajo hold it sacred; a young shepherd is said to have found the upper entrance around 1931 while following her flock. In the century since, helped by digital cameras and social media, it has become the most photographed slot canyon in the world.
Step inside and the walls close overhead to a thin ribbon of sky, so little direct sun reaches the floor. The light that does slip through bounces from curve to curve, and the sandstone glows in shifting bands of orange, crimson, purple and gold, changing with every hour. Around midday in summer, when the sun stands almost straight overhead, a single shaft can drop clean to the ground and hang in the drifting dust like a solid column of light — the image the canyon is known for, best from roughly June to August. You go in only with a Navajo guide, both because the place is sacred and because a storm miles away can send a wall of water down the slot without warning; a 1997 flash flood killed eleven visitors in the lower canyon. Since 2019, tripods and photo-only tours have been banned, so today everyone shuffles through at a walking pace.