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| Canyoneering | 8.00 Miles |
3,000 AEG |
| | Canyoneering | 8.00 Miles | 6 Hrs 15 Mns | | 1.28 mph |
| 3,000 ft AEG | | | | |
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| | Intermediate Canyoneering - Difficult or dangerous; Tech Climb; rope reqd; descent anchor; exit technical; | | B - Up to light current; wading/swimming; possible wet/dry suit | | III - Normally requires most of a day |
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| partners | | I think this is also my favorite technical canyon in Zion so far!  We woke up early and hit the Observation Point trail and got almost to that lookout before taking the East Mesa trail to drop into upper Mystery Canyon making sure to avoid the first canyon and go in the second one.  The canyon opens up quite dramatically before us as we head down the very steep trail down thru the Death Gully.  The park service wants us to stick to the drainage instead of bypassing drops, so some extra rappels & bolts popped up in the upper section give the canyon over a dozen rappels.  Thankfully we've gotten quite good and leap frogging each other on rappels and we hammered out drop after drop. We did a few short rappels in the upper section before hitting the sweet narrows section which had another 5 or so rappels in the 15-50ft range while admiring the huge sandstone walls and praying for no rain.  The canyon opens up a bit with a few more 20ft rappels before the canyon further opens with another side canyon or two dropping. This area is also know for having a potential lake since a major landslide damned up the canyon and requires a 300ft or so climb to get up and over before descending back down to the canyon bottom. The canyon slowly narrows back up again afterwards with a 50ft sloping rap while we noticed a thunderstorm rolling in above us though we weren't too concerned because now we were downstream of that massive natural dam.  A little further down canyon and we hit that amazing 110ft Mystery Springs rappel and traversed out to the anchors and dropped down to that chockstone and further down into that refreshing pool for the canyon only swimmer/wader.  It started to rain on us while retrieving our ropes with slight difficulty, so we picked the pace up a bit and kinna rushed out of this amazing stretch of canyon. We creek hiked a bit, hit some down climbs, another small rappel, and before you know it we were at the amazingly sweet 120ft rappel down to the brown Virgin Narrows. Hmm, some canyon upstream must have recently flashed to turn it dirt brown but it made for a cool site with people starting to collect below us to watch us rappel. With the extra viewers, we all made short work of the rappel and again had some slight difficulty with the rope pull but we got it down without too much trouble but coiling the ropes up was a little challenging while standing in the dirty flowing creek.  We made short work of the creek hike down to the sidewalk with people asking us if the narrows were safe for them to be in since it was raining and the creek turned brown... Huh, I'm not a ranger or know what the weather is doing upstream... Just because I'm wearing loads of gear and descended from above doesn't mean I know any more than you do!  Speed walking on the sidewalk to the shuttles it was funny having tourists asking us what we climbed... We were canyoneering, dang it! |
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| Yea, canyoneering is an extreme sport... EXTREMELY dramatic!!! =p |
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