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| no partners | | We originally had a more ambitious plan, but decided to get out a little early in case the road was bad in some of the gullies. Did our usual route up Upper CMP Canyon North Fork.
This had more impactful changes in terms of navigation than malicious gap, but less impactful in terms of wilderness character.
Coming up to the usual talus field on climbers right we noticed deeper sidecut banks and drops below large boulders, but it seemed less bushy.
The talus field itself is NOTICEABLY LESS STABLE than it was in 2021 and 2022. We went up leapfrog style, keeping to the upper edge then cutting over to some trees and then took our normal cut out. I knocked down a set of large enough to cause serious injury rocks and I'm pretty damn comfortable moving on talus. My partner was not particularly happy with it, but we made it up without incident. I imagine a lot of fines got washed out that helped keep pieces together, plus some new pieces on top from what must have been a long string of freeze/thaw cycles.
The gully was a little tricker, some water on micro cliffs, and a saturated hillside. Glad we put it off a day! Once at the pillar garden we relaxed a bit and had a scenic lunch, then continued on... to a more overgrown cliffside. Not obnoxious, but some of the little ledges are trickier to navigate and not as comfortably wide. This is unlikely to pose an issue for anyone comfortable going XC in this area, but worth noting.
Instead of trying to drop and then go up the other fork, we decided to check out some little caves we saw from the rim last time and call it good. After some mild bushwhacking up we found them - no archaeological interest, but the downstream one was kind of charming.
The slickrock section is pretty unchanged aside from two fallen trees. One is obnoxious at the top of a little pourover/cascade that I would have limbed if I had my Silky, the other sort of sits nicely on the side further down and blends in better. I'm almost certain there's more rockfall at the top, but still the magnificent spot it has always been!
Waterfalls had more flow than usual but weren't massive, we did decide to bypass the bottom set of slick rock falls due to them being wet. It was easy to gain the skiers left bank just above them then walk down a broken grassy hillside to a gully. I was unsure how it'd work out, but it was some fairly straightforward slithering down to the wash and then a surprisingly easy exit down.
Going down was actually simpler - I think a lot of the tree limbs and bushes that used to clog things up got cleared away! I'd recommend just going up and down the main wash for the time being, and then making a side trip up from the slick rock to the pillar garden if you want to check it out. I'll take that for some slightly longer drops.
By now the road had dried up enough that it was an easy exit out, a few damp spots but zero issues with traction. |
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