I was super excited to see a slot canyon – I’ve been looking at amazing pictures at Antelope Canyon for over a decade now, and I had done a lot of research on where we can find an easily accessible slot canyon since Antelope Canyon is still closed due to Covid.
Enter Peek-a-boo Slot Canyon. Reviews said it was the most accessible slot people have been to. There were pictures of young kids scrambling up the entrance. Someone even was quoted as saying ‘this was grandma’s favorite hike.’ Sounded like a win to me.
I did all the appropriate research, printing out word descriptions, tracking where we’d go on Google Earth, everything. We even stopped at the visitor’s center before going and got the official map to the slot. You’d think we couldn’t screw this up. Or could we?
Well, the drive to the trail is a 26-mile dirt ride adventure on a road that they call ‘washboard.’ Though we did have a rental, we still were not keen on losing a wheel, so hubby took it slow. It took us about an hour. We found the parking lot for the trailhead, and the area looked like a scene out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Desolate desert every way we looked. Despite the 118 degree temperatures, I was determined. We started in on the trail, and I set my watch to make sure I could keep track of our distance traveled.
We were following the trail very well, and saw some nice desert views, if you’re into that kind of thing (my family was not). Eventually we came to a marker that marked the rim trail going to the right and the slots were to the left. I went to the left of the sign and continued on the path. After going about a mile, we realized we must have missed a turn, as we were still up on the rim. Unfortunately, I didn’t know where we went wrong, so we turned around. At this point, Wormy (after having declared “I hate the desert” a half mile in) is crying. I was pretty sure that was only going to make her feel more dehydrated (don’t worry; we brought the camelback with us).
Once we got back to the sign from before, we realized we needed to scramble down a pretty hefty rocky ledge in order to get to the slots. The path we followed was the people who must have looked at that and said “heck, no” and kept on toward the rim trail. It didn’t help that the area below was fenced off. I didn’t see that there was an opening in the fence until I looked closer.
Unfortunately, by this time we had gone 2 miles in the brutal heat, so I couldn’t afford to drag my family through another mile just to get to the slot canyon, plus a mile back (assuming we didn’t get lost again!). I was so disappointed in myself. This was what I had hoped to be the highlight of the trip, and instead I ended up torturing my family. Ugh.
Car Full of Harmony 
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