Any ideas / requests for scouting out canyon between copper & dupont near malicious gap [updated water for area q's]?

[eru]

This came up in comments last spring - we enjoyed malicious gap and copper canyon nearby and are thinking of packing in some water and establishing a basecamp to wander around and check it out, we have a couple days off in a week or so.

I know a few people have been eyeing this area, so anyone has requests or some research to share that'd be great. I'll be taking photos & recording route on my phone and will post up a guide after. Any suggested names for the area, or should I take a crack at it depending on what's there.

[Grasshopper]

Ended up just thinking I’d go down duponte at some time in the future. If I lived in the SW I’d definitely have a 4WD and canyoneering gear, but visiting occasionally I’m making do

For future reference, here is a good geocoded area photo [ photo ] (with tag notes) taken back in April-2011 on my and ssk44's Dupont Rim Loop- "death march hike". If I ever again wanted to reach/enter Salome Creek Canyon hiking in from the Dupont Cabin area, I would reverse my posted Gps Route for this April-2011 Dupont Rim hike and do an "out and back" to Salome Creek via first hiking in on our exit out of Salome Creek Canyon route. Hiking out and back this way will take you by the perennial [ Dupont Spring - Copper Mtn Quad ] area you would like to see. Hiking in past the spring area, once one reaches the end of the ATV two track, the steep off-trail traverse bushwhack DOWN [ photo ] to enter the X at Dupont Creek Canyon/Salome Creek Canyon is a real , but our original posted Gps Route down was also no walk in the park either and with route finding, took longer to hike it.

It's a beautiful, remote area to be.. Good luck with it!

[nonot]

@Grasshopper
Hank, everyone who has posted a triplog on that trip did the bushwhack/swim from Salome creek up Workman creek and out the Hell Hole trail. None posted a GPS route. Some of Vaporman's pictures show the waterfall but not the climb itself.

[eru]

Not everyone did the bushwhack, I had read those while looking at the trip as an option and decided to just grab some dayhikes in the area instead heh.

People doing 3/4? up the cliffs:

"I led it and setup a top rope anchor - had two people who wanted a belay. The others just used the rope as a handline." - not promising?

"We roped up for the waterfall bypass, it's got one semi-sketchy move that would end badly if you were to fall." - that'd be vetoed by my partner

From the same person on two different trips that did the bushwhack (doesn't sound too terrible vs someone that looked down it from the hell hole TR, and no one seemed to go down it in all of the TRs that I saw for hellhole heh):

"The hike up Workman is a bit of a challenge esp to get up out of the creek and bushwhack past that 50ft falls but it certainy is a sweet falls."

"There's a 45ft falls down there required us to bushwhack up a chute on the leftside LUC and traverse above the creek to get passed the falls."

That doesn't sound too bad - if I had more time I would have tried to reach out for more info, but we were in the middle of the trip by then.

[nonot]

That's why I recommended those triplogs. If it sounds above the level of your comfort, then I'd advise not to attempt it. Other options like Hank's route exist in accessing that area of Salome creek from the west side, but would seem to need a better 4WD vehicle than you have access to right now.

[Grasshopper]

Other options like Hank's route exist in accessing that area of Salome creek from the west side, but would seem to need a better 4WD vehicle than you have access to right now.

eru has been up on that west side already (to the Malicious Gap area) and within 4 miles of the Dupont Cabin. He has already confirmed with his primary AWD
vehicle [ photo ] that he can safely cross Tonto Creek drainage when the water level and flow rate is low enough and safely drive within 4 miles of the Dupont Cabin.
Note: The resident locals sometimes gather on the bank areas around that Tonto Creek crossing with their high-end ATVs/side-by-sides/F350's to watch the non local vehicles trying to cross without being flooding-out due to creek level miss judgements.. so one has to be careful what vehicle your driving to safely cross or it could be with a live audience watching

As eru previously discussed in this thread, he and his partner would probably plan to backpack hike up that last west side 4 miles of rough FR236 section to reach Dupont Cabin and then most likely plan to camp in the area of easy to reach, perennial Dupont Spring [ photoset ] . An additional 1.625 miles hike in to camp here would most likely be necessary that same day for more needed water, privacy, and closer to the primary destination of Salome Creek Canyon.

[eru]

As @grasshopper has pointed out, I did my homework and being up around FR236 earlier this year is what pushed me to want to explore more of that area.

The bushwhack down the falls @ workman would have most likely been fine if unenjoyable, but it would have been nice to at least see one person went down it vs all of them stopping at that point heh. We can both do class 5, but prefer to not freeclimb sketchy exposure... and there are other options available in the area that are new to us. The fact that the area seems to be getting overused and has limited camping options was another strike against it... though we didn't see anyone on trail the 3 days we were in the area so that probably wouldn't have been an issue. :p

The class 3 by the waterfall of malicious gap was fun and straightforward: [ photo ]

We do a lot of extended xc class 2/3 in the Sierra Nevada (our last trip this summer had a little over a week off trail going over multiple xc passes into multiple basins with no else in them), so we're used to risk assessment and judgement calls in the field. I admin a conditions group for the range that NFS refers people to, contribute off-trail pass write-ups to the equivalent forum for the region (HST), etc. I do know enough to know that those skills don't all map to the southwest - one thing that I don't really understand and is of great consequence is water availability, which is why I decided to ping it publicly (but figured it wasn't worth a new thread).

@nonot I fully understand the urge to caution people new to a community, there's a lot of dumbfucks that end up punching their PLB for SAR to come in etc and slots aren't a great place to have something go wrong.

My point re: the triplog quotes was more that most people seem to just climb up the cliff with either rope or free solo w/ exposure vs bushwhacking, as opposed to "everyone has bushwhacked it". I'm not concerned with GPS, I can find a social trail to that point easily enough if it exists, it's just odd that there's not a single report of someone going down it and only one person went up it, which seems to put it at enough of a dice roll I went with more straightforward options.