My career in aerial firefighting started during the summer of ’22 in Show Low, AZ. A little middle-of-nowhere town on the eastern side of the state in some very dense and beautiful forest. The area is so super special and I consider myself lucky to have spent several months there.
In just over an hour’s drive from Show Low you can be standing on the edge of the Mogollon Rim (often pronounced “mowgey-on”) and feel like you’re on top of the world. For someone who spends so much time looking down at the world from the front seat of an airplane, standing at the edge of that range feels impossibly immense. It also happens to be a famous area due to the 1975 alien abduction of Travis Walton. That’s a whole journal entry itself, so I won’t get too deep into the lore, but I will tell you that my friends, Ty and I actually navigated to the alleged coordinates and stood in the very spot Travis was beamed out of the Apache–Sitgreaves National Forest. We made sure to wear our custom crafted tin foil hats. 👽
An hour-ish in the other direction and you can be standing in the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert National Parks. They were stunning, but like with most rocky places, timing is everything to get the full beauty and drama of the color and detail in the clay and sandstone. That day I was in a bit of a rush, so I had to drive through the parks mid-day and missed the sunrise/sunset magic. Don’t make this mistake if you ever visit the Upper or Lower Antelope slot canyons in Page, Arizona.
Lower Antelope Canyon is what I wanted to focus on most for this jOurNal EnTrY. The drive to the Antelope Canyons in Page, AZ are a bit further from Show Low than the Rim and Travis Walton’s abduction site, about 4ish hours by car. I get 2 days off for every 12 consecutive days I work, so it’s almost always “gonna be a no from me dog” to wake up early on my first day off. Through my research I found that earlier morning light would yield the best views and photos in the canyons, so I picked the Lower Antelope Canyon tour with Dixie Tours, day off #2, at 8am.
I arrived an hour early – 7am- armed with my fancy camera, a GoPro and my iPhone 10, but I was late. 7am would be fine in Show Low or Phoenix, but the Navajo Nation, unlike the rest of AZ, does recognize daylight savings time, so I actually showed up at 8am. They were cool though and let me go on the 0815 tour 🤓 I’m really just telling you this in case you ever decide to visit. It may be a little easier to accommodate a change like that for a solo traveler than for a family of four.
The tour starts with a little history and some rules, like, no GoPro’s 😬 Definitely look into the do’s and dont’s before you go. And definitely do the 0800-0815 tour if you go in June. Holy buckets, man, the lighting was sooooooooooofkngoooooood.
You’ve gotta climb down some fairly steep stairs and then take turns in groups of about 10 to start your walk through the canyon. The tour guides do a great job of spacing out the groups so you have unobstructed views and opportunities for pictures without some random tourists in it. They also know the best settings for your phones to maximize the quality of the photo, the best angles and have some interesting lore that they share about many of the features. It takes a little over an hour to get through, many parts are very narrow and you definitely have to be fairly agile to complete it. When it’s all over you walk up the rocks through this tiny slit in the ground and back into the open Arizona desert. It blew my min – once you’re back on the surface you can turn around, look towards the canyon and see nothing. It’s just vast, dry desert – all of the very beautiful rocks that have been carved by flash flooding are down below the skin of the earth and you would never know otherwise.
This is a link to my Lower Antelope Canyon gallery. I took well over 400 pictures and thinned it out to around 60 for the album, which was like, really hard. You can be a completely amateur photographer with 0 skills walking through there and make pro-quality photos happen – I still look at these pictures in my phone every so many weeks and my jaw just hits the floor. I guess I should mention that all of these photos are unedited and taken via iPhone 10 (2022). Put Lower Antelope Canyon on your bucket list, I would wake up at 3am on my first day off to see this place again 🙂
**It’s also important to note other popular places to visit in and near Page, AZ: Horseshoe Bend and the Glen Canyon Dam. Both of which I was able to squeeze in during my visit. We live on the coolest planet ever.
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