A tight squeeze

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.”

The Bureau of Indian Affairs holds most of the Navajo Nation’s 27,000 square miles, an area about a sixth the size of California, in trust, meaning the Navajo own it but the federal government manages it. The people were given home-site leases and grazing permits.

Parts of it, including the region surrounding Lake Powell, are riddled with slot canyons, and the northwestern corner of the Navajo Nation near the lake contains “some of the most beautiful in the world,” says Richard Fisher, a Tucson-based photojournalist and explorer who has traversed canyons on every continent for 25 years.

Fisher, the author of “Earth’s Mystical Grand Canyons,” says the Navajo Nation didn’t pay much attention to the slots in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Locals who herded livestock in the region knew of them, he says, but tribal agencies weren’t concerned -- until the photographers started showing up.

Now photos of Antelope Canyon are ubiquitous, and people are responding.

For some, the challenge of negotiating these secret passages is itself a lure. In canyoneering, a sport with roots in the ‘70s, adventurers equipped with ropes, life vests and wetsuits, go beyond mere scrambling to swim shallow puddles and deep pools or rappel down waterfalls.

“When you go climbing, at the end of the day, you’re climbing,” says Rich Carlson, who has been roving canyons for 25 years and now heads the American Canyoneering Assn. in Cedar City, Utah “When you go out for a day of canyoneering, you’ve been hiking, climbing, swimming, rappelling.”

Whatever their motives, however, some who enter the canyons cause problems. They get lost or injured or worse. When a flash flood swept through the canyon in 1997, 12 French, Swedish, British and American hikers and their guide had nowhere to go. Some tried to scramble above the rising waters and wedge themselves in the rock. The moving water was too quick and powerful. Only the guide survived.

By then there were signs of backlash. The remote Kaibeto community southeast of Page had issued a resolution in 1996 closing its slot canyons after a bout of accidents. That resolution still stands. “We don’t have any rangers on hand, no clinic or hospital that will tend to any hikers, no rescuers, and it’s 50 miles to the nearest facility with a helicopter,” says an employee at the Kaibeto Chapter House, the seat of this Navajo district’s government, who would give only the name Janell.

Adds Carlson, who has trained rangers from the Navajo Department of Environmental Resource Protection in canyon rescue skills: “There’s a feeling of, ‘Why should we let someone come on our land for $5 or $7 and let them incur $30,000 in rescue expenses?’ ”

Another matter that makes some Navajo reluctant to bring in outsiders is that wild lands can be sacred.

“The Holy People emerged from the ancient caves and underworld caverns that we interpret as ‘canyons,’ ” says Adam Teller, a medicine man in training and a guide in the grander canyons of Canyon de Chelly National Monument. “The Spirits of the Holy Ones carved out those slot canyons to enable mother earth to grow.”

Many Navajos believe Wind People, also called the Spirits of the Holy Ones, occupy slot canyons. They are places you go to make an offering, says Effie Yazzie of Antelope Canyon Tribal Park.

An offering is like a pact with a spiritual entity. A specific object is left in a particular way in exchange for a service from the entity, such as healing someone who is sick. “It’s not a place to hang out. You go there for a purpose and then come back out.”

Then there are the trolls. Tales of these creatures and other wicked spirits and ghosts haunting slot recesses make some locals reluctant to find lost hikers, says Janell.

For others, however, the rewards of guiding outsiders through these canyons outweigh all risks.

Antelope Canyon, which flows north into Lake Powell just east of Page, is a lucrative venture for both the Navajo nation and the seven tour operators granted permits by the Navajo Parks and Recreation Department. Navajoland’s most famous slot, it attracts -- at $28 per head -- 50,000 people a year. That’s not many compared with the 5 million who invade the Grand Canyon each year. But the slot is considerably cozier than the 10-mile-wide Grand Canyon. In some places you can reach out and touch both walls.

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Inside the rock

Working his way past the obstacles, Klemme’s thin brown ponytail waves above his camouflage hydration pack. We encounter puddles of slush and ice reaching from wall to wall in a passageway not much wider than our feet. In places, he props his elbows on each wall and scoots his whole body forward on his forearms, feet dangling. Whatever works.

We are exploring Cardiac Canyon, one of the new places he hopes to open to paying clients. Cardiac Canyon is located on Klemme’s aunt’s grazing lands, which have been in the family for about 100 years. Klemme’s aunt, Rita Tsinigie, hiked in the slots as a child. “Grandpa grazed sheep down in the canyon in winters,” Tsinigie says. So did her father. The family took their sheep to lamb in the canyons. “There’re still rock corrals down there.”

Klemme spent summers on this land tending to his grandfather’s cows and riding horses. The experience was “kinda like being in the West back in time,” he says. “We didn’t have running water, no electricity.” He and his friends ate a lot of potatoes and canned food. “My buddy got to where he could make the fry bread. He was a white dude,” chuckles Klemme. “He was the fry bread maker, that guy.” They four-wheeled and rode dirt bikes in their spare time. “Just getting anywhere, that’s how we learned a lot of areas.”

For many of the older people, the old life hasn’t changed. “They’re still doing the traditional ways of getting up, herding sheep all day and bringing them back in,” Klemme says. Others raise cattle because cattle don’t need to be supervised so much.

Klemme’s family treasures were kept secret for a long time. “When my dad was living,” says Tsinigie, who now lives in Las Vegas, “he just didn’t want too many people out there, so we want to keep it that way.”

And yet she too tried doing her own slot tours. But finding an accessible hiking route to the canyons proved too difficult, so she quit.

When Klemme began his tour company, leading clients at $85 a pop through his family’s grazing land into Canyon X, Tsinigie told him it would be OK just so long as he keeps groups small, so that their slots don’t become like Antelope. “It’s too crowded,” she says. “People get frustrated.”

Deep in the canyon, Klemme leans over to pick up sand and rounded stones. “It’s 100-something grit,” he says of the sandpaper-like coarseness. “When you get this running through water carving stuff, it doesn’t take much. Force of the water is a big thing.”

The walls sweep inward then outward 100 feet up. Sacred or not, it is hauntingly beautiful. And tranquil.

At one spot, Klemme has put in a homemade ladder -- a 2-by-4 with chunks of wood nailed on as stairs. We climb and then walk and then pause to take in the stillness. The only sign of wildlife we’ll see the whole day is coyote scat on the rim.

Although flash floods are a real danger, common sense is a reasonably good defense. Klemme put our canyon scramble off five days because of sketchy weather. “The most valuable skill in canyoneering is your judgment and ability to evaluate the safety and the reality of a situation,” says Jeff Haflett, a Phoenix-based guide who plans to offer rappelling expertise on Klemme’s future Cardiac hikes. “The best thing to do is get back in the car sometimes.”

Klemme’s initial plan for this slot, named for the steep hill at the entrance, is to introduce it as a five-hour hike. Clients would journey down-canyon to where it meets another slot in which he offers tours, where a jeep will pick them up. Arriving at the top of the canyon now, we walk around saltbush, cliff rose, Mormon tea, yucca and gnarled junipers. Following a worn cattle trail, we find a wash and come upon a crack in the earth where water began its carving project, slicing an opening where dark and light, Wind People and ghosts, beauty and destruction all belong, part of the ongoing exhibition in Earth’s well-concealed art gallery.

For his part, Klemme doesn’t need to poeticize to explain why, despite the obstacles, he wants to bring people into new canyons. He relishes the look on people’s faces as they stand, dwarfed by nature’s creativity. Besides, he adds, “It’s more money. And people are more happy, I think, when they come out and don’t have anybody around them.”

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Katie Showalter is a freelance writer based in Torrey, Utah.