Memory Of Water

Last month we spent a long weekend in Northern Arizona visiting a canyon. And of course by "a canyon" I mean the Grand Canyon. What else could I possibly be talking about? 

It feels like a long time since I've been to a canyon. It's not something that I seek out for visits very often. I'm not sure I can even remember the last time I went to anything resembling a canyon, let alone named a canyon. I'm thinking maybe Zion National Park in 2015. Does Hovenweap's mini canyon in 2020 count? I'm not sure. Canyons are just not my thing, I guess.

So how did we spend the day after our trip to the Grand Canyon? Well...by visiting another canyon. What else? Grand Canyon done. Time to visit Antelope Canyon.

Now, there is the very real possibility that you have no idea what I'm talking about when I write Antelope Canyon. But believe me, there's a very real possibility you know Antelope Canyon, even if it's just through online pictures of sinuous red-orange carved rock lit magnificently through cracks and crevices by the hot desert sun. You know...like the pictures above and below this introduction. Somehow, somewhere, you've likely seen some pictures of Antelope Canyon.

And it's very likely that you have been wowed by the photos.

I wanted to take and have pictures like you (and I) have seen online. But more than just the pictures, I wanted to find out more about this thing. It's not a canyon in the sense that the Grand Canyon is a canyon. And by that I mean a giant, gaping place in the planet way wider that it is deep. The Grand Canyon a mile deep and at its widest point 18 miles wide. Antelope Canyon isn't like that. It's way smaller. It's also a slot canyon.

What's a slot canyon, you ask? I had to look it up. And just so you don't have to look that same information up...

A slot canyon is a canyon with a depth to width ratio of anywhere 10 to 1 to 100 to 1. That's a canyon that's between ten times deep and 100 times deep as it is wide. At its widest point, the Grand Canyon has a depth to width ratio of 1 to 18. Not 18 to 1; 1 to 18. If the Grand Canyon had a 10 to 1 depth to width ratio, it would be a tenth of a mile wide and a mile deep. That's pretty deep and skinny. If it had a 100 to 1 depth to width ratio, it would be 1/100th of a mile (or 53 feet) wide and a mile deep. THAT is a slot canyon.

The Grand Canyon was formed by the slow action of the Colorado River carving it's way through the Earth over millions of year. Not so with Antelope Canyon. Slot canyons are formed by sudden torrents of water moving at a very high rate of speed through soft rock (like sandstone). These sudden torrents of water are flash floods, which are typically only common enough to create something like Antelope Canyon in very dry locations where there is effectively no way for the land to absorb sudden large rainstorms. The carving of the rock is caused by the water moving at extreme speed and the fact that the water is carrying abrasive dirt and sand. Water carves out both large open canyons like the Grand Canyon and tall thin canyons that are slot canyons. But the action and the result is totally different.

Those flash floods, by the way, are still doing their work. If it rains at the wrong time, Antelope Canyon can be flooded with water to 25 or 30 feet deep in a heartbeat. Sound dangerous? Well, if there's nobody watching the weather, then I guess it is. But they typically only happen during monsoon season in July and August.

To get to Antelope Canyon, you need to do two things: (1) drive to the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona and (2) book a tour. You need to do the first because Antelope Canyon is on land owned by the Navajo. You need to do the second because since 1997, taking a guided tour is the only legal way to visit. 

Before 1997, the Canyon was just open to anyone who could get themselves there. And there were side effects of that completely open availability. That meant trash, graffiti and those pesky and extremely dangerous flash floods. Since '97, it's been guided only. 

We booked our tour through Roger Ekis' Antelope Canyon Tours who took us out into the desert to visit Upper Antelope Canyon. And, yes, there IS a Lower Antelope Canyon (and more). We picked our trip based on reviews off TripAdvisor and figured we didn't need to do both Upper and Lower Antelope Canyons. Aren't they pretty much the same? We don't know that answer to that question necessarily. 

When we checked those TripAdvisor reviews, by the way, most were super positive, but some were overly critical about what I will sum up as the staged photography nature of the tour. More than one review complained about what I interpreted as a scripted tour where everyone on the tour was tutored in photography of the canyon so that everyone would emerge with the best (and presumably the same) pictures of the place. I'm not a huge fan of believing negative reviews, particularly when the majority of the reviews of any experience are very positive. Still, there were concerns there.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted those best pictures. But I also wanted freedom to take more than the classic photographs that everyone went home with. I hoped I'd get that.

I also just wanted find out what this place was really like. The images that are shown online are completely context-less. How do you get to the Canyon? How do you get into it and out of it? What's it like to walk through? How tall is it? Are there ever any people in this thing because there are never any photos with people in them it seems. I assumed I'd get this.

Antelope head in the top photo. The bottom is the sunrise and sunset scene.

So first of all...yes, the tour we took was heavily focused towards a series of what I'll call classic views of Upper Antelope Canyon. We were advised how to set our the screen brightness and the filter on whatever version of the iPhone or Android phone that we happened to have with us and in a couple of spots, our guide actually took the same picture for each group on the tour. We have a vertical panoramic shot of us standing at the entrance to the Canyon and color and black and white versions of a spot where if you take the photo just right, it appears that you have angel wings. So does everyone else on our tour.

There's also a face in one spot, a couple of bears, an antelope, a sunrise / sunset scene and an alien. And the tour stops so everyone can take the exact same pictures. Everyone.

But you know what? If you didn't want to do any of that, that was fine too. If you wanted to do you own thing and take whatever pictures you like, you could. And so we did. We took part in most of the staged photographs but we also took pictures of whatever the heck we wanted. Our guide, Cindy, was just awesome. She was patient and thorough and even gave very effective demonstration using water and the sand near the canyon of exactly how it was formed. The tour was honestly fantastic. And I think we emerged with some amazing photos.

But I really wanted to find out what the deal behind this canyon was. And we did that too.

The Grand Canyon is a large, long gash in the surface of the Earth. When you are standing outside the Grand Canyon you are on a very large and very flat high desert plateau and to look at the canyon you stand on the edge and look down. Want to walk into the Grand Canyon? Find a trail and walk down.

Antelope Canyon isn't that. It's effectively a very large sandstone lump (I was going to use the term boulder but it's way, way larger than a boulder) sitting on the surface of the Earth with a very large and not necessarily straight crack running straight through the middle of it. It honestly looks like some secret cavern or hideout from some fantasy or science fiction movie or series. I'm thinking Star Wars, Game of Thrones or Dune here. It's astonishingly different than the Grand Canyon. It's in fact probably as dissimilar as an experience as you could possibly get from two places with the word "canyon" in their names.

It's a heck of an entrance. And I swear I've never seen this is any of the pictures online.

The Navajo call Upper Antelope Canyon Tsé bighánílíni or "the place where the water runs through rocks". But they also refer to it as "The Crack", which is appropriate because that's exactly what it is.

The entrance to Upper Antelope Canyon.

Once you step into Antelope Canyon, you are in the world that shows up in the pictures online. You don't have to walk 20 minutes or so or even into the second "room" of the Canyon. Step in and you are in. All the way in. The sand path and light ahead of you hints at the way through the Canyon but look up and that rock just hangs over you like billowing sails frozen in time. The colors and the shapes are just amazing. Something that really only nature can create while it's almost unbelievable at the same time that nature can actually do this. 

It's tall. We were told 120 feet tall at its deepest point. You are dwarfed by the rock but you also don't feel like you are at the bottom of something really deep, particularly because you can rarely look straight up to the sky because the rock twists and turns above you. You don't feel like you are in a canyon in the traditional sense. 

It is also tight. There are places you can spread your arms and touch the smooth and at the same time rough rock walls (which are decidedly not anywhere close to vertical) on either side of you. Having said that, our group was I'd say 15 in size and I really didn't feel cramped for space that often. Touching, by the way, is encouraged.

The Canyon is tall.

The time we were allotted in the Canyon itself was about 30 minutes. It honestly felt longer. This experience was not rushed in any way, although I'm sure it helped that we were on the last bus from the tour company we selected and I'm sure Cindy allowed us a little latitude to dawdle a bit.

We walked through the entire length of the Canyon. I'm guessing it was between a quarter and a half a mile long, then we walked out of the back side of the Canyon, up a sandy hill and back over the top of another piece of rock that was to the left of The Crack as we entered. 

Did we see Lower Antelope Canyon while we were there? No we did not. We drove by it on the way to Upper Antelope Canyon but it's really nowhere near the place we visited. It's a totally different lump of rock with some sort of vertical fissure created by flash floods, rock and sand. There are apparently four additional parts of Antelope Canyon you can visit but it's not like they are contiguous or anything. They are likely just different sandstone canyons that look a little different. That's not what I imagined at all. I figured they would all be connected. Physically that is, not metaphorically.

Looking up at the branch of a tree in Upper Antelope Canyon.

This place is magical. It is as breathtaking as the pictures I saw before I got here. And by breathtaking, I really do mean it. That first room that you step into is astonishing. It is simultaneously gorgeous in its form and awe inspiring in its structural beauty. I can't really remember feeling this same way recently about a place we've visited that wasn't built by man.

I can also confidently say that there's no way I want to be in a place like this during a flash flood. As we walked through the Canyon, we saw limbs of trees wedged into the crannies of the Canyon above us. And not like at eye level or on the ground. Try like 25 or 30 feet above us. That means the water level during a flood is really that high. Can you imagine the force of a 25 foot high wall of water coursing through a narrow slot canyon all of a sudden? I'm not sure I want to.

On the name...we didn't see any antelopes when we visited. Antelope Canyon is located near Page, Arizona, which was established in the 1950s when Lake Powell was formed by when a dam was built nearby. When the Lake was formed, it interrupted the travel patterns of the pronghorn that lived in the area. Proghorn are often referred to as antelope but are really no such thing. That wouldn't be the only misnomer out there about wildlife in the American west.

Exiting Upper Antelope Canyon.

But...that's not the whole story. There are three more things. Yes, I know, three is a lot more things. I'll try to be brief.

First thing: The time.

When we booked our tour with Antelope Canyon Tours, every confirmation and reminder email we received (and there were a lot of emails...) prominently reminded us that our tour would operate on Phoenix time and to remember that. We figured this reminder was likely because the state of Arizona doesn't participate in Daylight Saving Time and that if you were coming from Utah (Page is just south of the Utah border) and didn't remember that the state immediately south of you was an hour behind you from March through October, you'd be an hour early.

So we are cruising along Arizona Highway 89 and all of a sudden the time on Waze jumps forward an hour. Arrival time is now 10:05 a.m. for a 9:50 a.m. tour time. What the heck? Did we somehow get delayed? Did we actually leave Flagstaff later than we thought we left? We were a little freaked out. We can't be late for this tour, can we? We checked the time in Flagstaff and in Page and both locations showed an hour earlier than Waze (which was really operating off the phone time) showed.

So we decided to check the time zone map of Arizona. As it turns out, not all of Arizona refuses to participate in Daylight Saving Time (see map below borrowed from the Department of Transportation website). The northeast corner of Arizona DOES observe Daylight Saving Time. But not the WHOLE northeast corner; there's a little piece of the northeast corner that is not connected to the rest of the non-DST-observing part of Arizona that also refuses to acknowledge Daylight Saving Time. And we happened to be traveling from the DST-denying portion of Arizona and through the DST-compliant piece of Arizona to the smaller DST-denying portion of the state. 

We weren't late. The time changed back to Phoenix time 1.6 miles from Antelope Canyon Tours' office. But as people who don't like to be late EVER, this was a little freaky.

Second thing: The bags.

The other reminder that we received (over and over and over again) in emails from Antelope Canyon Tours before we showed up in Page was that no bags were allowed on the tour. Check that...no opaque bags. Clear bags are cool. And they DO sell clear bags in the gift store.

We run into this kind of thing when we attend sporting events and we assume it's so people can't bring bottles of alcohol into the event but why would anyone bring booze on a Canyon tour in the middle of the day? So we asked when we checked in. The answer? People sometimes bring their trash and leave it up at the Canyon. This made no sense to us. It's OK for me to bring trash in a clear bag that I might leave for good out in the Canyon but it's no good if the bag in not clear?

But when we boarded the bus, we were reminded no non-clear bags and we were also asked to shake our water bottles. Huh?

As it turns out, the issue isn't trash, it's ash. Like ashes of deceased loved ones. Why anyone who is not Navajo feels like they should bring their dead relatives' remains out to this place is beyond me. But apparently people do it. And when they do, the Canyon has to be closed, cleaned and blessed before it can re-open. Don't bring human remains here, people. Please!!

Navajo Taco, Hope's Frybread.

Third thing: The frybread.

This trip had one more foray into Navajo culture and history besides just visiting Antelope Canyon. On our way up to the Flagstaff area, we stopped for lunch at Hope’s Frybread, a Navajo-owned restaurant in Mesa, just east of the Phoenix airport. I’ve had frybread before, most notably on my 2021 vacation to Arizona in the fall of that year. I can still remember the frybread topped with pineapple I had outside the San Xavier Del Bac Mission on the Tohono O’odham reservation just south of Tucson on that trip. Frybread is basically flour and water made into a crude dough and then deep-fried in oil. It was invented by the Navajo in the 1860s but it is very decidedly not an historic native American food. It was invented out of necessity based on cruel treatment of the Navajo by the United States government.

 

The Navajo, like many (or is it all?) Native American peoples, were eventually confined to a non-traditional territory by the government of the United States. “Non-traditional” in that previous sentence really means pretty much undesirable and way smaller than lands they had previously lived off. The best parts of their former land, of course, were taken for use by American settlers of European ancestry. Confinement meant just that: don’t leave the assigned area. But some Navajo didn’t want to obey rules they had no part in making, which brought punishment from the men (usually Army officers) assigned to keep the Navajo in their assigned spot in the new American southwest.

 

The punishment for 10,000 Navajo for a few of their people leaving their assigned territory against the Army’s orders? A forced 300-mile march from the west side of what is now New Mexico to the east side of that same state with a subsequent internment for about four years. It’s now referred to as the Long Walk of the Navajo. Of the 10,000 forced to walk across the southwestern desert, approximately 35% of those died either during the Long Walk or during captivity.

 

A major cause of death was starvation, a result of the inadequate rations provided by the government to the Navajo. Part of the meager provisions made available to the Navajo were flour, lard and sugar, which Navajo women used to make a kind of dough from flour and water which they could then deep-fry in the heated lard. That frybread is the origin of the stuff we ate on our way to Flagstaff and is regarded as a symbol of Navajo resilience. Rather than allowing the substandard ingredients they were forced to live with, the Navajo women in the 1860s turned those raw materials into something that allowed their people to survive. I see it as an eff you to the United States Government and I love that.

So before we headed north to Flagstaff and Upper Antelope Canyon, we had a Navajo Taco at Hope's. Ground beef, beans, cheese, lettuce, tomato and some kind of spicy sauce atop bread improvised from substandard ingredients. It kept me fed and nourished until Flagstaff.

The Biggest Goddamn Hole In The World

Apologies for the language in this post title. I blame Clark Griswold.

There are times in my life when I realize how lucky I am. March 2026 is one of those times. 

Last weekend we visited the Grand Canyon in Northern Arizona. Do I feel particularly lucky that I made it to that National Park in 2026? Not particularly. But I do feel lucky that it was my third trip there. I mean it's in the middle of nowhere and I've been there three times. A lot of people in this world are never able to move much beyond the place where they were born or the country where they live. Some folks scrimp and save so they can take a trip of a lifetime or get away for a week in a year. This was a weekend trip to some place that I'd already been to twice that a lot of people would have on some bucket list and not be certain that they would ever get there. 

I feel lucky to have been able to do this. After I've already done it twice before.

The first time I laid eyes on the Grand Canyon was in the summer of 1984 when my dad took an all-expenses paid recruiting trip (HE was being recruited) courtesy of a startup aerospace firm in the Phoenix area. At least I think it was a startup. I mean I really don't remember if I ever even knew. And the all-expenses thing probably didn't cover our side trip to see the Grand Canyon. Whatever. Close enough. That's why we were there in '84.

What do I remember about that Grand Canyon trip just after I turned 16? Pretty much nothing. I couldn't tell you what we did or what we saw, although I feel pretty confident that we looked down into it and that three of the four of our family members took a ride in a small airplane into the Canyon and that I don't recall actually walking into the Canyon at all. And on the airplane thing, it was probably below the rim. Not 100% sure. That memory (or lack thereof) is actually one of the inspirations behind me writing this blog. I reminisced about what I could not recall from my first visit to the Grand Canyon in the very first post on this blog back on my 45th birthday.

Trip number two? 26 years later. July 2010. Solo. On that trip I was determined to do one thing I hadn't done in 1984 and that was to actually walk into the Canyon. Not like all the way or anything but at least so I could get below the rim a good distance. I joined a ranger walk first thing in the morning with a big bottle of water I probably picked up at a convenience store somewhere near where I was staying (this was before I routinely took a water bottle on vacation) and spent maybe an hour and a half on a hike into and out of the Canyon. Cool stuff.

Now I have been there a third time.

The Abyss. Hermit's Rest Shuttle Bus stop number seven.

On a most basic level, the Grand Canyon is essentially a very large gash in the Earth in an otherwise very, very flat high desert plateau sitting about 7,000 feet above sea level. How did it get that way? Quite simply...the Colorado River made it that way. Over a very, very long period of time. Like millions of years. Sound farfetched? It did to us too a little bit but the land around the Grand Canyon is relatively soft and the Colorado River carries abrasive material like sand and rock particles that can cut through the sedimentary rock in the area of the Grand Canyon.

So how grand is the Grand Canyon? How about 270 miles long, 18 miles wide at its widest point and about a mile deep. Does that make it the biggest goddamn hole in the world? Maybe, although that question is really tough to answer. The Grand Canyon is not the longest canyon in the world (it's second) and it's not the widest canyon in the world (it's also second) and it's not the deepest canyon in the world (it's sixth). The Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in Tibet is both longer and way deeper than the Grand Canyon but it's also way narrower. On a volume basis, maybe Clark Griswold was right. Either way, it's pretty darned big. 

Probably some good advice for Instagram influencers.

With all that going for it, the Grand Canyon must have been an early add to the National Parks portfolio, right? I mean we all know Yellowstone was number one but this place must have followed shortly thereafter, right? Like first 10 or so? 

Not so much. Try 14. February 1919. The same date as Maine's Acadia National Park and after South Dakota's Wind Cave and California's Lassen Volcanic. Why so long? Totally speculating here but this canyon thing is in the absolute middle of nowhere and despite its size, it was probably an undiscovered gem for quite some time.

Undiscovered by some. Those that were here before 1492 knew about it all well and good.

There is evidence of man's presence in and around the Grand Canyon 10 to 12 thousand years ago. There are 11 different Native American tribes which claim part of the Canyon as part of the ancestral homeland. But once Europeans started claiming parts and eventually all of what is now the American west, they didn't seem to be bothered about a massive canyon. Spanish explorers led by Hopi guides first visited the area in 1540s but apparently didn't see much point in the whole thing. Neither did anyone else for about the next 300 years. It pretty much sat ignored for three centuries.

Then in the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States started mapping the Colorado River. Miners followed after that, seeking copper deposits in the area but apparently it didn't take long before it became obvious that tourism would be more profitable than copper mining for early European settlers. President Benjamin Harrison protected the Canyon as a Forest Reserve in 1893. Theodore Roosevelt elevated it to National Monument status in 1903. Then in 1919, it got to full National Park status. 

The Grand Canyon is claimed as an ancestral homeland by 11 Native American tribes.

So that National Park property...it covers the entire Canyon, right? Ummm...no. Not remotely. On the South Rim of the Canyon, really the easternmost 30 miles are easily accessible (the North Rim was close when we visited last weekend). The Park goes beyond those limitations, but not by road. And with Flagstaff experiencing a +24 degrees above normal heatwave in our time there, we were in no mood to hike about beyond the paved limits of the Park for very long. Or at all.

And actually and honestly, the heat isn't why we chose to not hike beyond points we could drive or be driven. We just didn't want to hike in the backcountry. 

I would venture that the majority of the visitors to the Grand Canyon National Park don't make it the full 30 miles or so of the easternmost portion of the Park. I would imagine most visitors stay within the less than three miles from the Grand Canyon Village to the Grand Canyon Visitor Center and maybe a bit beyond to Yaki Point. There's plenty of overlook-ing to do into the big hole that is the Canyon and both major trails to walk into the Canyon are within that span (the Bright Angel Trail at the Village and the South Kaibob Trail at Yaki Point).

I base that venturing on two things: (1) I believe that's exactly what I did the first two times I visited the Park and (2) the amount of people we encountered this year when we moved beyond the less than three miles or so noted above.

Views from a viewpoint just east of Mather Point looking west (top) and east (bottom).

We decided we were not going to do what most people do. Yes, we walked to Mather Point from the Visitor Center and we did walk on one of the two trails that start within that span, but we wanted to go places that are more remote. Where there would stand a chance of being fewer people. We hopped on the Hermit's Rest Shuttle Bus in the morning and rode that route all the way to the west end, with three stops along the way. Then in the afternoon, we drove all the way out to Desert View at the eastern edge of the Park to see the historic 1932 Desert View Watchtower. And of course look into the vastness of the Canyon.

Our trip west and then back east again on the Hermit's Rest Shuttle took us about 2-1/2 hours. the Park's website says it's an 80 minute ride but that's not allowing for any stops. We stopped at four places and got a different perspective at each one. We (or I) stood not that close to the edge of a stone shelf overlooking the Canyon at Powell Point and we first laid eyes on the Colorado River later on the ride at Pima Point. In between those two we hit The Abyss where we looked what appeared to be about straight down a couple of thousand feet into the Canyon.

I think it is easy to dismiss the views in person and the pictures we look at after leaving the Grand Canyon as the same. Sure, the colors of the eroded and collapsed walls of the Canyon are the same sorts of reds, yellowish-beige and green with each mile of the Canyon you travel. It's also easy to look out over the rim of the Canyon and just be overwhelmed with the size and claim that you just see the same thing everywhere you look. Cliffs. Rocks. Towers. Gullies. Bare trees at the rim and tiny, hardy evergreen shrubs that can cling to life in a place without much water lower down.

But it's not the same. It's not just a hole in the ground that's identical from place to place and from mile to mile. It changes. I know this if for no other reason than we were awed in places that we visited along the South Rim and we were less impressed with some spots. The Canyon really does appear more vast in certain places than others and the appearance of the Colorado makes a difference in those views. If you need any other proof of this lack of same-ness, ride the Hermit's Rest Shuttle in the sideways-facing seats on the left side of the bus (facing the Canyon on the way out). In that seven mile drive, you will see a Canyon that changes as you ride. What a privilege to be able to do that.

Views near the Bright Angel Trail Head (top) and at Pima Point (bottom). Note: NOT the same.

If you want a little more distance to your vista, you can get that at the Desert View Tower. We didn't manage to go into the Tower while we were there and view the landscape from the top of the Tower (too long a wait on timed admission tickets...) but the Canyon edge that you walk along to get to the Tower is not strictly facing across the Canyon. You actually get to look down its length just a bit.

And it seems to go on forever, which from the edge of the Canyon and the distance our eyes can see I suppose might be true. The visibility in that part of Arizona is incredible. I'm sure it's due to the flat-ness of the land. Two days after our Grand Canyon visit we were at a viewpoint at Petrified Forest National Park and we could see the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff on the horizon easily. They were 108 miles away from the spot we stood. You can definitely see for miles and miles.

If you need any convincing about the flatness of the land, check out the horizon on most all of these pictures. It's perfectly at eye level and it's pretty much perfectly flat.

Desert View.

So we had to take a little bit of a hike, right? 

I was so impressed with my walk into the Canyon on my last visit in 2010 (the South Kaibab Trail, I think) that I wanted to do it again. I think once you start walking in the Canyon, past walls of rock and through natural stone arches and along ledges with hundreds or thousands of feet of drop next to the path you are walking along, you get a different perspective on the place. You are no longer walking along a high desert plateau but are really following the Colorado River down into the depths of the Earth.

We didn't need to do a long hike here. We knew that we weren't going to make a dent in the full mile depth (that's depth, not walking distance) down to the bottom of the Canyon and we were very attentive when we came to the sign showing a shirtless white dude with a very sunburned back vomiting his guts out because he tried to walk to the Colorado and back in a single day. I've done my long hiking days. I've walked to Machu Picchu and Arches National Park's Delicate Arch and to the top of Mount Misen on Miyajima Island. I've also walked far enough in a day to find gorillas in the Ugandan mountains and fossils in the Canadian Rockies. I don't need to do every hike out there.

Walking up the Bright Angel Trail.

We picked Bright Angel Trail, a gently sloping and switchback-ing path wide enough to accommodate several humans or maybe a couple of humans and a mule train passing each other if they needed to. We saw no mules on the way down or up, by the way. But there was certainly evidence of prior mule activity. Mules don't wear diapers and their owners don't have to pick up the poop. Tread carefully.

We set our stopwatch on the phone for 15 minutes and walked down. 16 years ago, I was told that it would take about twice as long to get out as it took to walk in. I didn't time it that day but I did this year. It took us 25 to get out. Pretty close to double. 

I think seeing the inside of the Canyon is important. It is valuable to feel the temperature rise, even with a little walk down, and wanting to long for shade pockets to rest, particularly on the way up. Seeing and feeling and hearing the difference below the rim resonates. It's not the same as it is at the rim. Looking up at where you used to be (and let's be honest, we made it maybe 150 or 200 feet down into the Canyon so maybe 3-4% of the way down) and realizing how you got there was an essential experience for me, possibly because the land is so very flat at the Canyon rim. It's just an experience you can't get without making that walk.

We could have easily walked further. Not to the bottom of the Canyon all the way to the River but I will say the images from the bottom in the movie shown in the Visitor Center make getting there look awfully appealing. It's a completely different environment down there at the water's edge. 

There was a time I considered doing that. Walking all the way to the bottom and staying overnight in one of the huts they have down there a mile down into the Earth. That time is probably gone. I've accumulated a list of places I want to get to that is far, far longer than I will ever get to. I'm thinking my third trip to the Grand Canyon is likely my last. And If it is, it was a pretty good one. I feel confident I did three things in Bright Angel, Hermit's Rest and Desert View that I've never done before. What more could I ask for?

At Powell Point. It IS pretty grand.

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This post is about one man: Nelson Mandela. It is by no means intended to be a biography or really all that detailed whatsoever. We'll see how short I can make this. Apologies in advance if it's not as short as you want. It's not going to be short.

Some of the places we visit have horrible histories. Wars. Colonization. Repression. Racism. Torture. Revolution. Censorship. Violence. Rampant abuse of power. Corruption. Graft. Disease. Exploitation. Denial of basic human rights. The list could go on and on and on and it does with words far worse than I've written here. South Africa is right up there with the best (or worst, I guess in this case) of those places. I guess at one time or another and for extended periods of time, South Africa could embrace all those terrible words and phrases at the beginning of this paragraph.

I know I've only written one real paragraph so far but lest you think the country of my birth (the United Kingdom) and my adopted home country that I love so much and in so many ways (the United States) are immune from that litany of bad things in paragraph number one, think again. You can put all of those words against both nations at one time or another and they would fit perfectly (and maybe even some today). What else you got? France? Hah! Germany? Please! Spain? Nope, nope, nope! Pick pretty much any nation on Earth and you'll find what I wrote to start this post. It might have been a long, long time ago. But it's there.

But this post isn't about any of those nations. It's about South Africa. And South Africa is different. Not because it's worse than any other country on Earth, but because of how justice was finally meted out. Do you know how the revolution finally happened in South Africa? It was by vote. It was peaceful. Think the United States and Western Europe are superior to the rest of the world? How many nations out there ultimately achieved complete regime change without bloodshed? 

How did that all happen? I have just two words for you: Nelson Mandela. 

All those countries that we have visited that I referenced earlier? On some level, they all have national heroes. I don't think I've ever been anywhere that far and away had a singular guiding force in the true establishment of their nation like South Africa does with Nelson Mandela. 

We had to spend some time in South Africa tracking down Mandela's legacy.

Nelson Mandela Statue. Cape Town.

I knew something was up with Nelson Mandela and South Africa way, way before we set foot in South Africa late last year. I grew up in the 1980s. I turned 12 in the first year of that decade and attended high school and my first university entirely within the '80s. When I was in high school I knew that South Africa was under all sorts of pressure to abolish Apartheid, their segregated societal system that preserved power with the white minority over the black majority. I knew (or at least I thought I knew) that there was some dude named Nelson Mandela imprisoned for his beliefs who advocated violent overthrow of the government. And I knew that Steven Van Zandt wasn't going to play Sun City. And I'm not trying to be funny with that last one.

But I didn't really know what Sun City was. Or who Nelson Mandela was. Or really anything about South Africa really. Time to fix at least some of that.

Nelson Mandela Square, Johannesburg.

Maybe a very quick history of South Africa is in order. Quick being the operative word. I'm skipping a lot here. This post is trying to be about Mandela, not the history of South Africa.

Colonization of what is now South Africa began by the Dutch in 1652. They weren't the first ones to explore the area (the Portuguese were) but they were the first to settle and start pushing the native peoples, the Khoikhoi and San, into less desirable areas of the continent so they could take the harbor of what is now Cape Town for a resupply station for ships making the passage to Asia.

The Dutch held South Africa (it was not the size it is today) until the early 1800s when it was ceded to Britain as a prize in the Napoleonic Wars. The British outlawed the Dutch language, which alienated the European descendants (the Boers) already living there who moved inland away from Cape Town to escape the British. Over the next century (approximately), the British gained full control of South Africa with maybe a war or two in there involving most notably the former Dutch settlers and the Zulu. Oh...and the discovery of both gold and diamonds as abundant natural resources.

In 1910, the British consolidated the former Boer colonies into a single South African Union which was self-governing but also still under the control of the British Crown. South Africans fought on the side of Great Britain in both World Wars and the country was eventually granted independence from colonial control in 1961. By that time, the white minority was fully in control of the country with no desire to give it up. 

There wasn't always Apartheid (which literally means "apartness") in South Africa. That happened in 1948. But there was plenty of institutionalized racism happening in South Africa a long, long time ago. 

Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg. 

By the time Nelson Mandela was born in 1918, the government operating under the South African Union had already passed the 1913 Land Act, which segregated land ownership within the country, allocating about 7% of the total land area for black people. It also prohibited the selling or leasing of any land designated for whites to black people. 

Before Mandela's tenth birthday, the government had proceeded with additional laws like the Urban Areas Act, which segregated living areas for black people outside (rather than within) the cities they worked in, and the Color Bar Act, which prohibited black people from holding skilled tradesmen positions.

Then came the National Party and Apartheid. With the National Party, there was no more pretense about sneaky laws designed to make non-whites feel inferior. It was all just out in the open. Their slogan was "Die wit man moet alkyd baas wees" which means "the white man must always remain boss". They even manufactured some support from God when the Dutch Reform Church asserted that the Afrikaners were God's chosen people and black people were a subservient species. 

More rules followed. 

The below is not a comprehensive list. 

It's just to set the tone here.

1949: The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. That one is kind of self-explanatory.

1950: The Population Registration Act, which labeled all South Africans by race, and the Group Areas Act, which created separate residential and business areas for each race.

1951: The Separate Representation of Voters Act, which robbed non-African, non-whites of their representation in parliament. This act spread explicit and official race-based discrimination from just black people to all non-white people.

1957: The Immorality Act, which prohibited sexual relations between whites and non-whites.

Getting the picture yet? 

Laws alone don't tell the story. We needed to dig deeper.

Community tributes to Mandela outside one of his houses (the third, if I'm remembering right).

We spent time last October and November in both Johannesburg and Cape Town exploring the history of colonialism and repression in South Africa and tracking down sites relevant to the life of Nelson Mandela. In Joburg, we spent a full day visiting what was probably far too many sites (including at least three former Mandela homes) along with a quick stop at the Apartheid Museum. In Cape Town, our Mandela-quest was informed by a half day trip to Robben Island along with a colonialism-themed food tour around the streets and alleys of Cape Town.

And I'm only sort of complaining about our day trip in Johannesburg but I do feel we could have spent more than the 45 minutes or so we were allotted at the Apartheid Museum. We basically speed-walked through that thing.

Some stuff stuck with me. It usually does with tours like this. We actually learned a ton and a lot of it could be stitched together I am sure to create a window of a portrait of what life might have been like for a non-white in South Africa before the end of Apartheid. But for the purposes of this post, I'm going to focus on three sites.

Mandela House, Soweto

The house in the picture above is located on Vilakazi Street in the township of Soweto outside of Johannesburg. It was built in 1945 along with innumerable residences exactly like it on lots that were similarly sized and pretty much the minimum size that a house like this could be placed upon. The one above is different than the others only in the respect that it was purchased by Nelson Mandela and in 1946, he moved into the house along with his first wife Evelyn and their first child. It was the first house he would own; he would hang on to it until 1997. One wife later (Winnie) as it turned out.

Mandela was not born anywhere close to Johannesburg. He started out life in the Eastern Cape Province. But he moved / ran-away-from-home to Joburg with his older cousin to (1) escape an arranged marriage; (2) finish his education and establish his law practice; and (3) ultimately embark on his life's work which was freeing the country of his birth from codified, institutional racism. His first home around Johannesburg was in the Alexandra township; when it came time for him to buy his own property, he moved in to the place on Vilakazi Street. The house is preserved as a museum today.

From a Mandela history standpoint, the house for me didn't shed a ton of light onto the life of the man. Yes, the house is small. Yes, there was no indoor plumbing. Yes, he lived here at the start of his monumental adult life. But other than that and absent the whole South Africa racism thing (we'll get there...), it's a starter house for a young couple in the 1940s. My mother grew up in that same decade in a house with an outhouse and a non-plumbed bathtub. Nothing surprising there.

Inside the (first) Mandela House today; Nelson's favorite chair.

But there are scars of pre- and post-Apartheid South Africa all around and over the house. First, while this seems like a pretty good 1940s starter home, this was likely the best choice from an extremely limited portfolio of properties available to the Mandelas. 1946 was well after the Land Act and the Urban Areas Act were in effect but before the introduction of Apartheid. Want to buy a house as a black man in 1946? Choose whatever you want and which you can afford from the 7% of the land allotted to the more than 80% black population. This circumstance isn't physically manifested in the house, but a house of this size at that time likely represented somewhere in the upper half of the maximum possibility property ownership for someone with Mandela's skin color.

The other scars on the house are more real. Scorched brick from fire hurled at the house. Bullet holes alongside stories of Winnie and the kids having to shelter in the interior of the house to avoid gunfire. A trash can lid used as a shield to protect from bullets with evidence of just how non-effective such a shield could be in in the house. And that fire and gunfire. All from government forces. No gang warfare here. Just the government of South Africa waging war on its own un-represented population.

A trip to the Mandela House involves parking the car and walking through the circus of street hawkers and Soweto citizens packed close to what is now a top tourist attraction looking for opportunities to assist with anything. Getting there involved driving through Soweto, from its fenced, well-maintained single-family homes in ordered neighborhoods to dirt-floored, corrugated metal shacks and shanties with electricity self-rigged from power poles and portable toilets like we might find on construction sites in the United States as the only place to pee and poop. The level of poverty in Soweto is striking for someone (me) who has never really been anywhere so densely populated with such unnecessarily basic shelter. I know there are places in this world that have it way worse and I'm not just being a white American expressing outrage at a level of poverty that I just don't see regularly but from my perspective, the governments of this world have the power to fix this stuff. It doesn't need to exist. Over simplifying, I know. Call me an idealist.

No pics of the shanties. I'm not taking and posting photographs of other people's poverty handed down by their own government.

Is a trash can lid an effective shield against bullets? Not really, no.

Robben Island, Cape Town

Nelson Mandela was arrested during his struggle to abolish Apartheid a number of times. A quick AI search on Google lists four arrests starting in 1952 and ending in 1962 with at least one additional informal detention in there for good measure. The number of times he was arrested is not that important for the purpose of this blog post. Most of these involved a brief stay in jail followed by a release; most of these arrests were, after all, unjustified from a democratic society perspective, which I get that South Africa was not. But the last one was pretty significant. It landed him with a life sentence with 27 years served at the time of his release in 1990.

Mandela was sentenced to prison in June 1964. As a black man imprisoned for activities in organized resistance to Apartheid, he could end up at only one place: Robben Island, an Island long used to separate undesireables from the rest of South African society (it started as a leper colony in the 1800s) just off the coast of Cape Town that was pretty much escape-proof due to its remoteness. A prison with 1,000 or so inmates and 310 armed guards with German shepherd dogs to watch over them. No women. No white men. No colored men. Just black men. Robben Island was only cruel enough for black men in the Apartheid era. Mandela would remain at Robben Island until March 1982 when he was moved to Pollsmoor Prison on the mainland.

Today (like the Mandela House), the prison is a museum. It was the first place I put on my Cape Town list when we decided that our South Africa trip would stop in that coastal city.

Robben Island's quarry. I have two substandard photos because I was on the wrong side of the bus. I'm electing to post both.

Tours of Robben Island are guided only. A boat takes you from the harbor across the water; a bus takes you around the island; and then a guide walks you around the prison itself. The star attraction on the tour is undoubtedly the cell of Nelson Mandela (shown in the photograph two photos above). Mandela was secured in a single cell in a wing of the prison reserved for ANC leadership so those at the top of the organization would be unable to influence the men sharing communal cells. It didn't work. He was moved to Pollsmoor because he was still leading men at Robben Island from a solitary cell.

The stop at Mandela's cell was useful as a touchstone in our Mandela history quest. The title of this blog post is actually Mandela's prisoner number at Robben Island. I've visited prison sites on my travels before. Robben Island sounds like it ranks up there with the worst.  

Some things we learned.

For prisoners on Robben Island, 23 of the 24 hours of the day were spent inside in confinement, either in single cells, solitary confinement or communal cells. New prisoners and leadership of the various groups imprisoned on the Island were generally confined to single cells. And leadership meant leaders of outlawed political movements like the African National Congress (ANC), of which Mandela was THE leader. The other hour in the day? Two 30 minute long sessions outdoors.

Upon arrival at Robben Island, each inmate was issued an identity card which you had to take everywhere. Caught with no card? 24 hours solitary confinement. Second occurrence? 48 hours solitary with no food. Third "offense"? Six months solitary with reduced diet. And the diet didn't sound that great to begin with. Prisoners at Robben Island received a "Category C" diet which in the 1980s meant porridge with rice, corn, soybeans, powdered egg and fish powder on weekdays with a small piece of actual meat on weekends. Before the 1980s it was worse. Category A and B diets were not for black prisoners.

Robben Island identity card.

Before 1979, sleeping on Robben Island was on the concrete floor and the bathrooms in the cells were one red bucket per prisoner. Those 30 minutes of outside time per day? Bucket cleaning was part of that time too. Contact with the outside world? In the 1960s it was two letters and two visitors per year. That would be relaxed to six by the 1980s. 

Oh, there was one other place that outside time was permitted...hard labor at the quarry breaking rocks. With no protection from rock dust or the blinding light reflected off the white stone by the hot African sun. Inmates who spent a lot of time at hard labor on Robben Island later in life reported extreme difficulty with bright lights and couldn't cry because of damage to their tear ducts by the daily rock dust.

Justice in the prison was handled by the prison court. Discipline was handed out via whippings, days or weeks in solitary confinement and even extensions to prisoners' sentences. Sometimes inmates died. If they did, they were typically buried or cremated and their remains deposited somwhere anonymously. If families were even told that their relatives were no longer on Robben Island alive, it was usually the "alive" part that got omitted. More often it was a lie about the prisoner escaping.

Sipho talking to our tour group.

Pretty much everything we were told at Robben Island was inhumane and chilling. We didn't visit Robben Island for fun or amusement. We did it to honor everyone who was confined there mostly for just disagreeing with people in power. And that included Nelson Mandela. 

There are places in this world that we can visit as tourists that are powerful. Robben Island is one of those. It is most powerful today because tours through the prison are guided by ex-inmates. Our guide was Sipho, who was a resident on the Island from 1984 to 1989. His crimes? Being a member of the ANC and recruiting others to be members, including recruitment outside the country. He was arrested with five others and was tried along with four of the five. The fifth died from torture by the police. There will come a day when there are no more prisoners left to guide people around Robben Island. When that day comes, this experience will be less powerful. There is power in listening to someone who has actually lived through this kind of experience.

Liliesleaf Farm, Johannesburg

How did Nelson Mandela get from Soweto to Robben Island? The answer is at Liliesleaf Farm.

Liliesleaf was an ANC safe house in a white neighborhood on the north side of Johannesburg. The property was purchased by Arthur Goldreich and Harold Wolpe (both of whom were white) with funds provided by the South African Communist Party with a little help from both Cuba and the Soviet Union. Goldreich lived in the house with his wife and two sons, effectively creating the illusion of a family living in suburbia complete with black servants working around the property, including a driver named David Motsamayi, which was Nelson Mandela's cover name while he was at Liliesleaf.

Liliesleaf was purchased in 1961, which was right at the time when the ANC was moving away from non-violent resistance following the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and into violent armed resistance. That change was resisted by Mandela until he realized no matter how non-violent the ANC was being, they were met with increasing violence in their engagement with government forces. Eventually, that realization caused Mandela to push to establish an armed wing of the ANC, uMkhonto we Sizwe (or MK) which meant "Spear of the Nation" in English.

During our travels in South Africa, we learned that the ANC's struggle against Apartheid changed with each decade. Passive resistance in the 1950s was followed by armed resistance in the 1960s. That changed to student protests in the 1970s and world condemnation and sanctions in the 1980s.

In 1963, the police raided Liliesleaf Farm. They were tipped off by a neighborhood resident but also someone inside MK. There's no record that I'm aware of that identifies the MK informant and Gabriel, our guide for our Mandela Day in Joburg, corroborated this information. He also, however, said that everyone knows the informant was later assassinated at his hone in Soweto. How he knows this when nobody knows the identify of the information, I have no idea. But he seemed pretty sure of his information.

The 1963 Liliesleaf raid resulted in the arrest of a number of ANC leaders and effectively shut the property down as a safe house. Nelson Mandela was not one of the leaders arrested that day, because he had already been arrested, tried and sentenced to five years' imprisonment the prior year for leaving the country without permission and inciting workers' strikes. The reason Mandela was out of the country was to secure support and funding from other countries for the ANC's newly launched MK initiative, although during his trial the South African government didn't know that.

That's where Liliesleaf comes in.

Nelson Mandela's desk and chair from his room at Liliesleaf.

While the police didn't find Mandela himself at Liliesleaf, they did find extensive evidence of his involvement in the founding of MK. That information was supposed to be destroyed at Mandela's direction, but whoever was directed to destroy the documents apparently decided there was too much historical value to these documents and he instead hid them in a coal bunker (I'm honestly making up the "too much historical value" thing but what else could the decision be?). And of course, the cops searched the coal bunker.

Five year sentence for Mandela leaving the country without permisson? Let's make that "life" after the discovery at Liliesleaf.

There are innumerable tours around Johannesburg chasing down sites related to Nelson Mandela. I had a hunch that we should go to Liliesleaf and very, very few tours stopped here. It was so worth it. The story of the history of the ANC safe house told through storyboards and videos involving personal recollections by the residents was gripping. We were almost alone out there on the day we visited which was good for us but honestly concerning if that's a typical day.

Liliesleaf also has an exhibit dedicated to the history behind MK, including the story of Mandela's tour around Africa to secure funding and how MK smuggled arms and ammunition into South Africa. The arms smuggling was conducted in secret compartments of a safari truck set up specifically to do cross-border safaris into South Africa. The safaris were legit and tourists paid to be on the trips, having no idea they were actually riding in a truck smuggling weapons being used by South African revolutionaries. In the films in this part of the property, pretty much all the tourists interviewed were proud to have unknowingly fought against Apartheid.  

The picture below is a terrible photograph but it shows the 4" wide slot on one side of the safari trucks that was used to smuggle arms into South Africa. Cool stuff!!!

All told, we probably devoted two full days to Mandela and Apartheid tourism in our approximately two weeks in country. It was nowhere near enough to understand all the atrocities that the South African government committed against its own (black) people. At the same time, there is a ton to digest in many, many sites, particularly around Johannesburg. This is some heavy stuff and absorbing it all takes time. 

The one regret I have about our Apartheid time is the very little time we spent in the Apartheid Museum itself. I know I already complained about this. Honestly, it was so rushed that we could have skipped it entirely and not lost anything, I feel. But, if that rushed visit was the tradeoff for visiting Liliesleaf, I'll take it. Our time at the Farm there combined with our visit to Soweto and Robben Island likely got us the best overview we could have gotten in a couple of days. We are smarter and wiser for our time chasing down Nelson Mandela. Our perspective is forever altered, as often happens with quests like this.

We did not visit Sun City Resort on this trip. We didn't need to.

Our last morning in South Africa was spent at the top of Table Mountain, the flat-topped mountain that dominates Cape Town's skyline. On the cable car ride down from the top of that plateau, we looked over the water in Cape Town harbor and located Robben Island. That was pretty much the last thing we saw in South Africa before we headed home. This trip was worth it. For Kruger and fossils and penguins and even Apartheid. I'm done blogging about Africa for now. On to the next trip.

The view from Cape Town's Table Mountain. Robben Island is the island in the bay.