Today I got out early to drive around Monument Valley. The park is on Navajo land and the only road is a rough dirt road. There are a lot of restrictions as well. You must stay on the road, you cannot walk off the road as there are no hiking trails at all. Also there are several areas you cannot go into unless you hire a guide. You cannot take pictures of residents or their houses unless you have permission (and they expect to be paid for this). And finally, you have to have a permit for any type of commercial photography. This last point was the one that I thought for sure was going to cause me problems. Even though I wasn't doing commercial photography, the camera I use sort of makes it look like I might be.

I drove around for a while but most of the pictures I wanted needed the evening sun. I did find one and the plan was to jump out and quickly get the picture before someone started to think I was a 'commercial' photographer. Well it didn't exactly go like that. It ended up taking about an hour to get what I wanted. No one ever said anything though. 

After that I decided to pack it up and head towards the Grand Canyon as it was a few hundred miles away. But first I had a stop to make.

While planning my route last night I realized that I was going to pass within 50 miles of Page Arizona. The town is significant because it is very near the Antelope valley where the most famous and most beautiful slot canyons are. And as a bonus, they're also one of the easiest to get in to. If you're ever see a picture taken in a slot canyon, chances are it came from here. If you haven't, the Antelope valley slot canyons are really deep and really narrow wind and water sculpted sandstone. They twist and turn and the sunlight creates all these really interesting highlights and shadows. I like the way the Navajo's describe it as a place where the river has frozen in place. The canyon walls are so smoother and sculpted that this is really what it looks like, like vertical frozen waves of water.

So when I got into town and I found a guide which is required for the lower canyons. They are much more dangerous, a group of 11 tourists were killed there last year in a flash flood. A guide is only suggested for your first trip to the upper area where I am going tomorrow. Both the upper and lower canyons are on Navajo land. The guide company I hired is a well respected company that is run by a photographer and caters to photographers.

After hiring the guide I was planning on going to the north rim of the Grand Canyon before I had to return for tomorrow's trip through the canyon but it was too far away given the amount of time I had left in the day. So I stopped by the visitors center instead and found out they had a video about photography in slot canyons that I could watch. It was pretty helpful and will surely make tomorrow more productive. It also gives good driving directions to 3 other slot canyons in the Utah area. The one bummer I learned was that I was literally just a few miles away from these just a few days ago and I didn't even know it. I bought the video just for the driving directions after learning this.

So I still had a lot of time to kill since the tour wasn't until tomorrow morning. Page is a medium size town, near lake Powell but there's not really a lot to do here. They do have a movie theater but it wasn't showing anything I wanted to see so I just came back to the motel and veged in front of the TV for the rest of the day. Tomorrow I will be out from 9-4 in the canyons.