Oh Give Me A Home, Where the Buffalo Roam

April 29, 2026 — Day 36

Lone Rock Beach Campground, Glen Canyon Recreation Area, Big Water, UT

Today we get to make our hike in Antelope Canyon, probably the most famous slot canyon around. Canyon tours are huge business here. There are countless tour companies offering the unique experience, except it’s not that unique because visitors to the area have countless options available to them. It seems each company owns a part of Antelope Slot Canyon. Everybody wants the “beams of light in the sand photo” except that’s not what we wanted. We looked for something different.

We found Lester and Rose Ann’s (neither of us are sure how she spells her name) Mystical Antelope Canyon Tours. We were told to be on time, so we were half an hour early, we even beat Lester and Rose Ann there, blocked by the locked gate, we had the wrong code, oh was she upset, she had told the web company to update the code!

We scrawled our signatures on the back of a liability release. As waited for the other couple to arrive we chatted with Lester and Rose Ann. By noon they hadn’t arrived. Without a thought Rose Ann packed up shop, we got into the Suburban with Lester and the three of us headed out to the opening in their part of the canyon. She headed off to do other things. We never did find out of the other guests arrived late to the party wondering where everyone was.

Lester told us the real story. He was given his section of the canyon by his grandmother back in 1998, or was it 1988. The two big downtown operators are his brother or his uncle or some family members. Lester told us they pack the tourists in like cattle, 1,500 to 2,000 people through the canyon every day. You board whatever transit gets you to their part of the canyon be it an SUV, bus, open air “jitney” or a lifted 4×4 van from downtown or you meet them out to the canyon and mill about in the dirt waiting your turn to be herded along. That was definitely not the experience we were looking for. A few days later, when left Lone Rock and moved to Antelope Point Marina, we drove by 2 or 3 full size busses in the parking lot, everyone waiting their turn in the dusty dirt parking lot in blistering sun. No thanks.

When we have lots of pictures our new approach is that we each pick 5 or 7 out for the entry. We’ve done this before and we’ll do that at the end of this blog, but by doing that. But you’d miss out on all the back story, like “helping” Rosanne find their sheep. And you don’t want to miss that, do you?

Let’s hop in the SUV with Lester and drive to the canyon. Oh, we had hoped for the tractor drawn wagon, like the website promised, but I guess they only do that for large groups. Even with the windows down, the Suburban was comfortable and a lot less dusty.

Here we see some of the stairs. Rose Ann told us the wagon pulls up there, you clamber down the stairs and walk to the canyon’s entrance. We were thankful for the Suburban ride or it would have been a long hot trudge across sand if we had to do that.

Our stairs were narrow and steeper than home stairs. Lester along with help from some people built all the infrastructure.

Now we switch from our iPhones to our “real” cameras and wow, the color changes.

This is called White Balance, and today’s phones and cameras are very good at it, until you descend into a canyon made of red sandstone. We’ve tried to capture the true colors, but it is hard. What we will say is that for the most part those brilliantly colored photos you see in the famous pictures of Antelope Slot Canyons are exaggerated. Between camera white points and people using too much saturation you get photos that don’t represent reality.

Here Lester is demonstrating how water and sand make sand stone.

That’s pretty gross, that’s straight from a confused Sony a7R III. This is more natural, but still, we don’t remember the exact color of the sand.

More stairs! (susan here: I bumped my head!)

At the start of the tour the canyon really opened up, letting in light and letting the plants grow.

And more stairs!

We need to be thankful for the stairs. Lester told a story at one difficult scramble his Navajo boss got stuck and they needed a few strong guys to hoist him out!

We were constantly amazed at how wide, then how tight the passages were.

We were over an hour late ending the tour. Lester didn’t mind because he wanted to share the canyon with us. We couldn’t imagine any of the downtown tours going over time.

Rose Ann met us outside, clearly a little annoyed at Lester. They didn’t have a 2:30 tour so it was ok. He got in the side-by-side to go look for the sheep. We got back to the base and he had only found some of them. So Paul, Susan and Rose Ann headed out in the SUV to a lookout point. Rose Ann was just as full of stories and advice on places to go. We think she also just wanted to show that if she honked the horn the sheep know to come home. Lester couldn’t find all the sheep & thinks a coyote ate well that day.

On the way out and back we crossed a disused railroad line. We think it used to serve the nearby, and now decommissioned, Navajo Coal Power Plant. Their granddaughter is working with electric vehicle company to run test electric cars here. We were never sure if they were train cars or road cars.