It's a beautiful trap, this crack through which Harley Klemme shoehorns himself.
If the skies opened in a booming storm, escape could be problematic -- as a dozen hikers learned when a flash flood thundered through nearby Antelope Canyon seven years ago.
Then there's the matter of the trolls.
And yet, like all good traps, these sculpted fantasias of sandstone are powerfully seductive, seemingly throbbing with temptation. They draw people from around the world to Navajoland, senses primed for awe.
Klemme, who is part Navajo, knows this. Now in his mid-30s, with a broad face and midsection, he grew up in Page, Ariz. He worked as a plumber until the day he visited a guide at the rock monoliths in Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park due east of town. The man was running a fleet of 20 tourist-filled trucks, Klemme recalls.
"It just tripped me right there. I says, 'I'm in the wrong business.' "
After a six-month battle to win a coveted permit, he began leading paying customers into the popular Antelope Canyon. Eventually, he decided to push into new terrain -- onto an entrepreneurial path with its own obstacles, including the paradox of encroaching on secret, some would say sacred, places to sell people the solitude they covet.
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Carving a reputation
The Navajo phrase for slot canyon is Tse neh gi too na aah dis zjaa: "where water has painted a picture of itself." Water's medium in these slots is sand, and the region around Page has sand in abundance. Ancient seas and rivers left a palette of grains, most in red and yellow hues, over the course of eons. The sand was compressed and cemented together over millions of years to form sandstone. Then trickles and torrents of water moved over the sandstone surface after rainstorms and during snowmelts.
At weak spots, the sandstone gives way, and soon the water begins painting again, carving its likeness into the walls: violence as artist.
Courtney Milne, a photographer and author of "Sacred Places in North America," understands the fissures' allure, understands why, for instance, flocks of German photographers descend on Antelope Canyon every year in an ecstatic whir of shutters.
"The combination of being down there so far beneath the surface and feeling like you're in the womb of the Earth and the way the light plays off the shapes of the sandstone -- you feel like ... nature has created something magnificent [and] you're part of the creative experience that formed it."
