The rock at the bottom of the Grand Canyon is roughly 1.75 billion years old. The river that exposed it has been at work for perhaps six million.
That ratio explains the scale: the Colorado River did not build the gorge so much as unroof it, stripping away limestone, sandstone and shale until the dark Vishnu Schist of the inner gorge lay bare. A Grand Canyon and Antelope Canyon tour from Phoenix follows that same water northeast, to a place where erosion works at a size a visitor can touch.
Antelope Canyon sits on Navajo Nation land east of Page, Arizona. Its two chambers carry Navajo names — Tsé bighánílíní, the place where water runs through rocks, and Hazdistazí, spiraling rock arches. Flash floods cut them into Navajo Sandstone, a dune field petrified some 190 million years ago. In places the corridor narrows to shoulder width while the walls climb 120 feet. Light falls in from slots overhead and bounces down the stone, which is why photographers began making the drive in the 1980s. Grand Canyon and Antelope Canyon tour from Phoenix tours reach it by way of Flagstaff and the Painted Desert, roughly 280 miles of road.
The country is young as a destination and old as a homeland. The Havasupai, Hualapai, Hopi, Zuni and Navajo hold ties to this landscape that long predate John Wesley Powell's 1869 descent of the Colorado. Grand Canyon National Park was established on 26 February 1919. Mary Colter's Desert View Watchtower followed in 1932, its stone shell modelled on Ancestral Puebloan towers. Glen Canyon Dam, closed in 1963, created Lake Powell and steadied the green river that loops around Horseshoe Bend, a thousand feet below its rim — the third of the Southwest canyon landmarks that most Phoenix to Antelope Canyon day trips string together.
Two authorities now govern the pairing. Navajo Parks and Recreation has required authorized guides in the slot canyons since a 1997 flash flood; the national park is federal ground under the National Park Service, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1979. Grand Canyon and Antelope Canyon tour from Phoenix tour operators cross that jurisdictional line in a single day, which remains uncommon in the region. The pairing is geological as much as logistical: one canyon read across ten miles of air, the other at arm's length.
10 hr 30 min
