For about a dozen years, my wife and I have been taking trips to the western US to visit the many national parks and other scenic locations. For the first several of those years, we used vacation time and flew to get there quicker. In 2017, we retired, and in the spring of 2019, we took our first cross-country driving trip to see Arizona for about four weeks.

On a previous trip to Arizona, we visited Upper Antelope Canyon, which is on the Navajo reservation near Page. We chose a photographer's tour and were allowed (required, actually) to bring a tripod for shooting in the low light conditions of the deep slot canyon. Usually, the canyon is packed with people, but the guide would periodically clear out a short stretch for us to photograph without people in the way. The photos that we got were great.

On our return visit, we wanted to see Lower Antelope Canyon. In the intervening years, however, the photographer's tour there was discontinued. At first, I was not sure if I would be satisfied shooting hand-held, at the necessarily much higher ISO, and with people around all the time. Ultimately, we decided to go anyway, and we got much better photos than we expected. Antelope Canyon was initially deposited as layered sandstone and then was eroded over time by flash floods. The resulting formations in the stone are amazing. This is one of the nicer shots, which features an arch carved among the natural lines and curves.