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| Canyoneering | 2.45 Miles |
874 AEG |
| | Canyoneering | 2.45 Miles | | | |
| 874 ft AEG | | | | |
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| | Intermediate Canyoneering - Difficult or dangerous; Tech Climb; rope reqd; descent anchor; exit technical; | | C - Strong current; wading/swimming; waterfalls; possible wet/dry suit | | II - Normally requires a half day |
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| no partners | | Friday night, I had a few drinks and thought it would be a good idea to do S'mores Canyon on Monday at night. (My first S’mores log starts almost the same way). Tim proposed the night trip and I picked Monday. So Carl, Tim and I agreed to meet at 4 PM.
Monday rolled around and we were feverishly watching the weather forecast for Mt Graham. NOAA showed a 20% chance. Accuweather showed up to 50% in the hourly forecast. But the radar only had a couple spot of greens and they looked to be moving off. As we left Tucson we could see pockets of rain south of us.
We stopped in Benson for gas and food. While there we noticed that the back tire was low. It seemed like multiple forces was trying to tell us that S’mores was a bad idea. But we ignored the signs and continued on our way.
We got to the reservoir and checked the weather on last time. The POP was still the same, but the radar didn’t have anything in our area - clear! We figured we could watch the sky as we hiked up and we could do the first half of the canyon then bail, if needed. At some point I remembered my tea bag tag from earlier in the day, ‘Live life passionately, even if it kills because something is going to kill you anyway.’ -Webb Chiles
The sunset was beautiful. It added to the drive and the beginning of the hike.
We got suited up close to the first rappel. The frogs were going baa, baa in the dark. And a preying mantis wanted to be my friend.
Finally it was time to go! The flow was down from a month ago. But, it was still fun! We worked on our whistle commands, efficient movement down canyon, and setting rope lengths appropriately. In all the three of us moved pretty well as a team.
We got to the end of the first section of rappels and started on the slides. At some point I looked over and Carl was slipping and landed on the ground. He moaned in pain. His ankle was sprained. Would we be able to go on? At least the bailout point was near.
We got to the bail out point and while Carl was still limping he figured he could continue. It was the same amount of distance either way.
The next section was the bushwhack. There was a few patches of poison ivy to get around but nothing bad.
Got to what I called the hallway, I slid down to the first small pool then worked my way over to the left side to climb down. Happily, I did it without issue.
Soon we were rappelling again. On the 2nd to the last rappel, I noticed a crack that could eat rope, so when I went to rappel I removed the block and rappelled double strand. At the bottom I started the pull and it was coming until almost the end. It was stuck! I screamed ‘pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin’. It wasn’t my rope which made it even worse. I called Tim over and he also couldn’t get it to come. We had no choice but to leave it.
At the end, we took a couple pictures. Then we started to hike around the reservoir. I missed the trail and we ended up on a beach of the reservoir so we decided to swim. The reservoir was a nice temperature and so we started to swim. We started joking around about the loch ness monster and also how our stuck rope was going to somehow get loose and take up residence on the bottom of the reservoir and then come up and wrap itself around swimmers. We swam a bit faster.
The boys forgot to bring dry clothes, so we learned that it’s perfectly accepted to go to Denny’s in the middle of the night in your boxer briefs. We laughed really hard because it seemed so ridiculous.
We looked at our photos and found that one of the pictures our faces were disappearing- maybe we didn’t survive our amazing adventure down S’mores in the dark. |
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