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| Hiking | 7.87 Miles |
534 AEG |
| | Hiking | 7.87 Miles | 4 Hrs | | 2.64 mph |
| 534 ft AEG | 1 Hour 1 Min Break | | | |
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| no partners | | One day at work whilst not working, I saw something unique and cool on the satellite view. I made a plan to go check it out.
It was raining all day, and had rained almost 2" the day before. That was part of the allure for me.
I felt safe because despite being narrow slot canyons with no escape, they appeared to drain relatively small watersheds. It seemed that even while flowing there wouldn't be more than a few inches of water to contend with.
Once I got started, it was apparent that the water had flowed in the past 12 hours. But it wasn't flowing anymore. It made for a muddy mess though. 
The best thing I had done was download satellite photos onto my phone. These slots are not on topo maps. And there are a lot of them! Fingers in the earth like a crazy bolt of lightning! Traveling on the surface above the canyons proved to be quite a challenge. There were too many places where you would reach another finger from the main canyon that couldn't be crossed. Too deep to enter, and not narrow enough to jump across. Hike upstream until the slot got shallow enough to get through. And repeat!
The best course was to stay in the canyon bottoms. But occasional dryfalls (pourovers?) were too high to climb. I'd have to backtrack and find a way out of the slot, only to fight the finger slots again on the surface. ](https://hikearizona.com/dex2/images/smilies/eusa_wall.gif "Brick wall") (Going upstream was never a problem, it's downstream where you would get caught on a peninsula between canyons).
Frustrating because they were never over 40-feet deep, sometimes just 10-feet, and yet getting in and out was a big challenge. Trees provided the best route. The roots were larger than the arms and you could occasionally climb the tree to get up. In dry weather it might be easier to ascend when the walls sloped a bit, but these canyons are not carved from rock. They are just dirt. And mud. And the walls collapsed easily.
In fact, I found myself feeling very insecure about my own safety as I witnessed one such collapse ahead of me.  There were plenty of large landslide obstacles to overcome, only to have to fight through the mud and water pooled above them. I stuck to the center of the canyon, staying away from the walls as much as possible.
A collapse, despite not being rock, would have been trouble. Heavy slabs of saturated earth are no less dangerous than rock when falling from 30 feet above in slabs weighing tons. Determined to continue on, I surfaced and sent a safety text with my exact location and time I would certainly be back at the truck. I felt a little better.
I took a break on a hill between slots and ate some lunch before dropping into a different canyon for the trip back down toward the truck. This slot had a bit more growth on the canyon floor and somewhere along the way I lost my pack cover after ducking through some bush. Note to self. Next time a small biner on the pull-cord would be a good investment. 
The rain really started to come down and as I rounded a corner I woke up a beautiful grey fox that was napping under an overhang. It sprung up and then froze. We had a little stare-off and I managed to get a couple of photos before it decided to dart off down the canyon. There was a big fall I had to bypass, but I dropped into another canyon that eventually led back to the one I had started in. I headed back up to see the fall from below.
It looked climbable, but the "rock" in here is so crumbly that absolutely nothing would support a hand or foot hold of any kind. Sort of sketchy, and sort of fun. That's how I like my slots.  |
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| I'm not sure what my spirit animal is, but I'm confident it has rabies. |
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