Michael Collins, a kayak guide for Lake Powell Adventure Company, was leading a group of kayakers on a tour of the Lake Powell side of Antelope Canyon when he saw a coyote lying on a narrow cliff ledge near water level. The coyote looked healthy, but Collins knew it was in a life-threatening predicament.

Collins had led his kayaking group pretty far into Antelope Canyon when they encountered the stranded coyote. The canyon walls were 80 to 120 feet high, sheer and impossible for the coyote to climb, and the distance through the water was too far for it to swim before it could reach a place where it could get back on flat land.

Collins figured the coyote must have fallen from the top of the cliff, landed in the water and swam along the cliff wall until it found a rock shelf where it could get out. 

Collins continued his tour into Antelope Canyon, and when he returned a few hours later he saw the coyote was still on the same ledge.

“By then, another group kayakers had gathered around the coyote and were trying to rescue it,” Collins said. “But it was afraid of them and had worked itself far back into a crack of the shelf it was on. We could barely see him in there.”

The coyote remained on Collins’ mind the rest of the day.

“I had a feeling that the coyote was reachable,” he recalled. “This guy could be rescued.”

But how to rescue it was the question. You can’t just walk up to a wild animal and take it with you.

“I knew I couldn’t just grab it,” Collins said. “It would fight and bite and claw. We could both end up getting injured, and I didn’t want it to go that way.”

When Collins returned home from work he told his girlfriend, Kiona, about the coyote trapped on the ledge and that he was trying to think of a safe way to rescue it.

“Once I told Kiona about the coyote, I was committed,” Collins laughed. “There is a group of my friends and family, and we call ourselves the Coyote Clan. She reminded me of that.”

The idea for how to rescue the coyote came to Collins during the night. He would run some rope through a long piece of PVC pipe, with a retractable snare on one end.

“I guess it was one of those things when your subconscious keeps working on it,” he said. “When I woke up, the idea was already in my head.”

Collins went into his garage, fashioned the snare, then returned to the lake with the intention of rescuing the coyote. He brought two friends with him, Sky and Zach, to attempt the tricky task. It was a calm October Sunday morning. When he paddled into Antelope Canyon, he discovered that the coyote had left its spot on the ledge where it had been before, but Collins found it on another narrow ledge a few hundred feet farther into the canyon. 

“It had obviously tried to swim during the night but it must have gotten tired and gave up,” Collins explained.   

The coyote was in a spot where Collins could reach it, but even then it was going to be a delicate operation. 

“A coyote is such a wild animal, they’re just not going to let you rescue it,” he said.

Collins and Zach got out of their kayaks and stepped onto the sandstone ledge, one on either side of the coyote, which pressed itself back against the cliff wall. The ledge was only a few feet wide so the animal couldn’t go too far. Sky stayed in his kayak, where he held the other two kayaks and filmed the rescue effort. 

Collins extended his homemade coyote lasso toward the coyote and laid the open loop on the ground, hoping the coyote would step into it.

“The worst-case scenario is that the coyote would jump into the water,” Collins said. “If it did that, I could still get the loop around its neck and then grab hold of it.”

As Collins and Zach crept closer, the nervous coyote stepped into the loop of the snare with both feet. Collins raised the loop so it was behind the animal’s elbows, then pulled the cinch tight. 

“It couldn’t have worked out better,” he said. “I had it caught in a way that it couldn’t hurt me or itself.”

Using the pole, Collins gently lifted the coyote off the ground and transferred it into the front seat of his two-seat kayak. Inside the kayak, the coyote skooched farther into the craft’s leg space, under the front hull. 

Collins and Zach got into their kayaks, and the trio of coyote rescuers paddled out of Antelope Canyon into Lake Powell’s main channel and back toward Antelope Point.  Collins kept the coyote’s leg in the snare.

“He acted pretty calm, and just stayed there while we paddled out,” said Collins.

The group reached a location near Antelope Point where the cliff wall receded away gently from lake level to cliff top. The group pulled their kayaks onto the shore, and Collins loosened the snare that still held the coyote’s legs. Then they waited for the coyote – still lying inside the kayak’s front hull – to emerge from the cubby and walk away. The nervous coyote was hesitant to come out, but eventually it did. Once it had its feet on open land, it ran up the sloping side of the cliff. Near the top, it paused and looked back.

“It took a lot of effort and a little ingenuity but it worked out, and I’m really happy about that,” said Collins. “Coyotes are amazing animals. They’re smart and adaptive, and they’re revered – and rightly so – by a lot of Indigenous people. I hope he’s out there living a good life and howling at the moon.”