Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend Day Trip from Las Vegas with Lunch

The coach yawns to life before dawn and the neon of Las Vegas slides backward into the desert. Windows fog with breath and coffee; the highway hums, and the Mojave gives way to a harder, older landscape where red and orange become the grammar of the land. After hours of scrub and shale the bus rounds an escarpment and Lake Powell appears like a cut in the earth, a vast mirror catching sky. You step down into a different syntax of stone: Antelope Canyon’s slit walls that funnel light into theatrical shafts, and farther along, Horseshoe Bend where the Colorado River tucks itself into a thousand-foot loop and dares you to stand at the rim and feel small.