Without a guide pointing you to this crack in the Earth, you would have no natural inclination to squeeze and contort yourself through. However, that is the worse of it. The canyon immediately opens up. As strange as it seems from this perspective, it’s even stranger. We will walk right through this scene.
Now I know what you’re thinking: What’s with the carnival lighting? There is no lighting. It is actually very dark. What you see here is a long exposure gathering the tiny bit of sunlight that comes through the overhead crack and bounces off the rock faces on its way down.
The hike is supported by a series of extremely rugged steel stairways. Heroically fabricated to order, with utter disregard for any known commericial stair standards, each fits a unique pitch and width. Massive bolts hold the ironwork to the rock, because this really is a sewer pipe. When it does rain heavily, even 10 miles away, the slot canyon flushes with an unimaginable torrent. Getting caught in a flash flood here is certain death.
Expensive cameras and lens are lost in a slot canyon. It is so dark, exposure metering doesn’t work. With the help of our guide, I learned to photograph with a pinhole technique. To get decent images in this realm, we need both wide and deep fields of focus. So again against instinct, you stop down to your smallest aperture in your widest lens. Exposures are gaged by trial and error; mine were generally 20-60 seconds. Of course the camera never comes off the tripod for the entire hike.
