This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

A rough-and-ready video is stirring hikers' memories of a favorite Utah slot canyon, with its raw capture of a hiker dodging and twisting through the undulating red rock.

Colorado photographer Tony Litschewski didn't have any grand plan for masterful footage when he plopped a GoPro on his head at the mouth of Spooky Gulch for a quick November hike in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The popular little canyon is lower-investment slot hike — I did it while 8 months pregnant — and not exactly bucket-list material for an outdoorsman like Litschewski, who once spent more than a decade searching for a single "secret" slot in the Arizona wilderness. It was just a pop-in pop-out side trip during a camping excursion on Hole In The Rock Road with a Swiss friend who had never seen a slot canyon before.

Litschewski hit record and followed his friend, Andy, through the famously-narrow slot, filming the experience inside the canyon just as I remember it.

There are lots of slot canyon videos out there, some more polished than others. But this one seems to strike at a special visceral memory. I first saw it on the Facebook group Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Connection, which offers a worthy diet of inspiration for anyone with hungry desert dreams. It immediately started getting shared around so others could *feel* the experience of Spooky.

I'm not exactly sure why this video draws us in. I think Spooky's dimensions and shape lend themselves to the hamster-maze visual better than some of the more colorfully photogenic canyons do. Litschewski and his friend are moving at a good pace to unveil the slot's winding drama — and a shot of another person in action interests me more than the typical first-person adventure camera footage, which so often amounts to shaky scenery shots with no real sense of speed or scale. Litschewski said the mid-day sun provided adequate light in the dark, skinny sections, and the GoPro's wide angle and height on his head helped show the depth realistically.

But he said he "couldn't believe" the felt response viewers had to the video, which ranged from nostalgia to claustrophobia and "hyperventilating," as one commenter claimed.

"I didn't think [the video] was that great, being a professional photographer. I'd go back and re-shoot it at even higher light than in November," Litschewski said. "This is just a touristy video."

Maybe sometimes that's what people want: the experience of exploring around the next corner. There is no "pure" way to do that in film. There always has to be some sort of set-up to convince our eyes and brains that the image represents reality.

Sometimes the lie is extravagant, like a musical soundtrack you forget to notice, or the unnaturally smooth camera path of a drone. Vimeo is loaded with spectacular lies from Utah's desert, with time-lapse wonders and saturated colors to make the truth even more palatable.

This little video gives us a different balance of lie and truth, and it feels true to experience even if it's not classically beautiful nature footage — or even what Litschewski would prefer. Maybe our brains actually like to see the camera-bump of a footstep or the occasional glare of overexposure because it feels like how we felt in Spooky Gulch: a place where you can't see or move very easily, but where you are pulled forward in an urgency to find out what's around the narrow bend ahead.

To see Litschewski's work, visit naturesfinestimages.com.

Map and directions to Spooky Gulch available here.

-Erin Alberty