Bryce - Antelope

Antoine's view

A few hours' drive northeast of Las Vegas' disproportionate buildings, it was nature that built millions of fairy chimneys, known in English as hoodoos. It is the extraordinary Bryce Canyon, where erosion and repeated cycles of freezing and thawing have shaped these spectacular rock formations; the most famous is known as Thor's Hammer. Others have been dubbed "Queen Victoria"... or E.T.

Bryce Canyon is not actually a canyon, a gorge formed by a river, but a huge amphitheatre carved into the red rock plateau characteristic of the vast region known as the "Grand Staircase "that rises from the bottom of the Grand Canyon of Colorado to this Plateau. It was a carpenter named Ebenezer Bryce who gave his name to this natural wonder, today visited each year by one million people.
Well posted footpaths lead you deep into the heart of the plateau, passing rocky peaks that sometimes look as if they came out of Lewis Carroll's imagination, or have been designed by France's surrealist artist, the Postman Cheval. But it is nature alone that built Bryce Canyon

Starting in 1956, the construction of the highly contested Glen Cayon Dam, devised for hydroelectric power generation and regulation of the flow of the Colorado River, gave birth to a huge lake, drowning Glen Canyon and its natural wonders, and many Native American ruins. Today, Lake Powell has become an immense domain for pleasure boat cruises, in a maze of submerged canyons. How many natural wonders have disappeared in the process, nobody knows, but truly unforgettable sites have been preserved, such as, near the town of Page, the two "slot" canyons known as Antelope Canyon.

A visit to the Upper Antelope Canyon, the most famous of the two, must be planned around noon, and during the summer months, the only time when the sun is vertical enough for its rays to penetrate to the bottom of the canyon, revealing absolutely unreal colours. These amazing shapes have been created by the erosion of a kind of sandstone known as Navajo sandstone, named after the Indian tribe that inhabits this part of Arizona. A visit to these canyons can only be done with a guide belonging to the Navajo tribe, to which these visits are an important resource. It is "flash floods" that carve these waves of rock. The second canyon, Lower Antelope, is more difficult to access, a sudden flood, in 1996, killed 11 people including seven French visitors. But at the right time, at the right hour, Antelope Canyon is a feast for photographers.