Taking it easy at Lake Powell
written by Birgit, pictures mostly by Sam
21.05.2016 - 23.05.2016
20 °C
View
Around the world 2016/17
on dreiumdiewelt's travel map.
Navajo National Monument turned out to be a nice spot. We had originally not planned to go there, rather ended up there as a base for the night.
Being there we also took one of the hikes and were surprised to see a once more an enormous overhang with cliff dwellings in which Ancestral Puebloans have lived somewhere between 1250 and 1300 when they suddenly left. There still seems to be lots of scientific discussions and speculations around their leaving, with the most likely explanation being an over 10-year drought that the Puebloans took as a sign that it’s time to move further on their journey towards the center.
With the overhang being a bit closer to the valley floor vs what we had seen in Mesa Verde, the whole setup seemed a bit more realistic and I could actually see how a large group of people could live there – warmed by the winter sun in their overhang, while protected from the summer heat at the same time.
The next morning, we headed off to lake Powell. Contrary to our travels up to now, we have a reservation coming up and want to be in Page on Monday to take a tour of Antelope Canyon. So Lake Powell was going to be our base for the next days. As it was a Saturday, we tried to get to the campsite rather early in the day in order to make sure we’ll still get a slot. In retrospect this was not necessary, as the campground at Lone Rock was a huge beach. We picked a slot directly at the beachfront a bit away from the next campers and enjoyed a nice day at the beach.
It was a relaxing day. If it wouldn’t have been for the episodes of hefty wind or rather storm resulting in d a deep skin peeling, a perfect day. Specifically Max enjoyed being at the beach and in the water.
On Sunday we wanted to go into town. After an easy start into the day and a clean-up session of the van our first destination was Wahwaep campground, just a mile south of where we had stayed. As we longed for a shower, wifi and had a pile of laundry to do, it just made sense to invest in a campground again with all of these services – after all we had not been paying for camping for four nights in a row… After having secured ourselves a slot, we then stopped at Glen Canyon dam and the visitor’s center before going into Page for Sunday lunch.
At the Mexican restaurant we met three guys from Saaldorf, easily recognizable by the ‘SV Saaldorf’ shirt one of them was wearing. Saaldorf is just around the corner from my home town and used to be and still is one of the standard destinations when we’re going out for lunch with my family. So it was a nice coincidence and we used the opportunity to exchange travel recommendations, as the three had started in Los Angeles and were headed towards Denver and we are headed in the other direction.
Before heading to Horseshoe Bend, we did stock up again our supplies shopping at Safeways. While initially we were a bit put off by the masses of people headed to the Bend, in fact the people dispersed quite quickly and were loosely scattered along the rim. And the sight of the Horseshoe Bend with the blue green band 1000 ft underneath us was absolutely worth it. What a dramatic view and what a nice blue greenish band underneath us!
While Sam and Max went down to the beach, I did our laundry and uploaded the blog updates from Mesa Verde to Navajo NM. Unfortunately. the wifi was more than poor, so it took ages to upload all the pics. But better than no connection at all – after all we did not have wifi nor network for the last couple of nights. And during the days we usually have more interesting things to do than spending our time where there’s connection to the internet.
The next day started with another stop at the beach before we headed towards Antelope Canyon. We had cancelled our reserved tour the day before after we had heard from our Bavarian acquaintances that they had gone directly to the Lower Antelope Canyon on Saturday and got to go at 11am after just an hour’s worth of waiting. Knowing that around noon the light is best for taking pictures of the canyon and that they paid only 28$ per person whereas our tour would have cost 102$ for the three of us and would have started only at 3:30pm, we figured we’d take the risk. And we were lucky in fact. We got into the canyon shortly before noon and given that only the adults had to pay for much less money than what we’d paid otherwise.
The canyon was amazing! Breathtaking. I’m not sure how many pictures we took between Sam with the wide angle DRL and me with the GoPro. With every bend of the canyon there were new formations and the light playing on the sandstones. I was so happy that we went onto that tour. And even though Sam would probably have loved to take a photographer’s tour, we did get great vistas also on our tour. And we were lucky with our tour guide Tiarnen – he not only had all the information about the canyon, but was also a keen photographer and made sure we got the right pics in the right places.
I’m really happy that I had insisted on going to Antelope Canyon. It was definitively worth the visit and most likely otherwise we would not have gone to Lake Powell at all. And specifically Max loved the opportunity to play in the sand and water at the beach.
Posted by dreiumdiewelt 14:09 Archived in USA Tagged canyon arizona lake utah antelope powell
One of the best posts so far! Thank you for being patient with the slow internet connection and for uploading such amazing pics! I never heart of Antelope Canyon, but obviously know similar amazing pics. So now we have to do the tour of the National Parcs one day!!! Great inspiration!
by Anke Hampel