I am wary of famous viewpoints. Too often the picture is better than the place, and you arrive to find a parking lot and a hundred phones held aloft and a view that has been quietly diminished by everyone else looking at it. Horseshoe Bend, I’m glad to report, is not one of those. We drove out from Page before the sun was up, walked the sandy trail in the blue pre-dawn light, and came to the edge just as the first sun hit the far canyon wall. Lia gasped — actually gasped — and I stood there recalibrating what I thought a river could do.
Standing at the rim
There is no railing over most of the rim, which is either thrilling or terrifying depending on your relationship with heights. The sandstone simply ends, and a thousand feet below the Colorado River makes its impossible turn, wrapping almost the whole way around a great fin of red rock. The water is a deep, still green from up here, and rafts drift across it looking like grains of rice. We found a flat slab of rock a safe distance back and sat with our coffee, watching the light climb down the canyon walls layer by layer. I kept a firm grip on the back of Lia’s jacket, which she pretended to find insulting.
The color of the light
What no photograph quite prepares you for is how the whole scene changes with the sun. In the early light the canyon walls were a dull rose; within an hour they had turned to burning copper and vermilion, the shadows in the folds gone deep purple. The Colorado here is calm and glassy, a startling jade against all that red — the green comes from minerals and the slow water below Glen Canyon Dam upstream. We watched a single raft trace the bend’s full curve, so far below it seemed to move in slow motion. Lia said it looked less like a landscape than a diagram of one, too geometrically perfect to be real. It is real. I checked.
Page and the canyon country
Horseshoe Bend belongs to a whole country of red-rock wonders around the town of Page. Just upstream sits Glen Canyon Dam and the vast blue sprawl of Lake Powell; a few minutes the other way are the glowing slot canyons of Antelope Canyon, on Navajo land. We made a full day of it, ending back at the Bend for the late afternoon, when the tour buses had gone and the light turned soft and long. A pair of ravens rode the updraft from the canyon, tumbling over each other, and we watched them until the sun dropped behind us and the whole red gorge went to shadow and silence.
Getting There
Horseshoe Bend is just off Highway 89, about five minutes south of the town of Page in northern Arizona. Page has a small regional airport, but most visitors drive in — it’s roughly two hours from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and about four and a half hours from both Las Vegas and Phoenix. From the parking area (there’s a modest fee) it’s a 1.5-mile round-trip walk over sand to the rim, with almost no shade, so bring water and go early or late to avoid both the heat and the midday crowds.