They ascended, looked around at the sun, and ignored his warning, returning despite his last attempts to keep them above. Then, a pair of photographers issued their last warning - leave now. Being French, they didn't much care for the advice of Westerners. Soon, that wall of water came tumbling down, tearing every bit of clothing off each and every one of them, slashing their bodies for six miles against its corkscrew twists and troughs until only two were alive.

I parked along the road, there were no signs to indicate this was Antelope Canyon, but I could see the fissure in the distance. There was a red Jeep parked there, and a man reading a map. I knocked on his window and introduced myself. "It looks like the Navajo Guide decided to sleep in this morning," he said. "Its still early." We waited some time. I liked this man right away. He was a photographer in his 50's, had driven here from Georgia on a month-long trek across the West. We talked maps, and places, and then we saw a trail of red dust in the distance, the Navajo Guide driving across the sand in a blue truck.

We followed him a ways and introduced ourselves, paid him the fee, and he listened to the weather, and pointed to the fissure. We walked up to it; it was a one foot slit in the earth - and below, blackness. I said, "Where do we enter?" and the photographer said, "Obviously not here." A better inspection and I found a ladder hanging off the edge of the fissure. "Here it is," I said, looking into the darkness. "You first," said the photographer. He followed me in, and we descended. Lower Antelope Canyon was a wonder; although dark and cold, it was also a tangled display of contorted, smoothed rock angling in every direction; every foot a composition of anarchy, of thousands of years of flash floods.

We climbed its quarter mile length, walking parts, dropping or climbing others. In an hour, we were at the end. We stayed there for hours, and met up near the entrance. I said, "You want to do the Upper?" He said, "Absolutely." While he cleaned his gear by our Jeeps, I wandered the area, looking at desert wildflowers.

Desert Southwest Anza Borrego The Barren Desert The Channel Islands Windblown zoology off the coast of Los Angeles Colorado Plateau, Navajo Country Mesa to Canyon along the Plateau Death Valley The Saltwater Fish of Death Valley Mojave National Preserve Wandering the Eastern Mojave High Desert Stories from California's High Desert Areas Los Angeles Gray River in the Sun Los Angeles Map Imperial Valley Death and Salvation on the New River Panamint Valley Panamint Valley Roach Motel White Sands and Southern New Mexico Atomic Agriculture on the Rio Grande The Salton Sea Bombay Beach and the Salton Sea Slab City and the New River Death and Salvation on the New River Trona, California Trona and the Unusual Lake Searles Western Mojave Four Seasons of the Mojave Los Angeles Coast Images and captions from the LA coast.