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| Canyoneering | 5.50 Miles |
550 AEG |
| | Canyoneering | 5.50 Miles | 10 Hrs 56 Mns | | 0.50 mph |
| 550 ft AEG | | 40 LBS Pack | | |
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| no partners | | My wife and I did Minnow Canyon on Thursday, the 19th.
I inadvertently added half a mile to the beginning of our trip when, after leaving the road to take a picture, I failed to get back onto the road. I chose a path which I thought would rejoin the road, but I was mistaken.
It was a cloudy day and rained a bit as we made our way down into the wash leading to the canyon. We encountered some catclaw, but I was dressed for it and didn't find it especially annoying.
We ended up going over the tunnel sections. It may have been easier had we gone through them.
This route had a lot of down-climbing, more than I was expecting. There were a few spots where we either did not see an "easy" way to get down or simply lacked the nerve to do the down climb. I ended up rigging some short rappels for those sections.
The long rappel was fun. The anchor boulder already had some decent webbing and rapid links attached. I decided not to add any more, though I did slightly reroute one piece of webbing in order to distribute the load between the two pieces of webbing. The one thing that I did not like about the setup was that the anchor was pretty far back from the edge; I figured that this would make pulling the rope hard and indeed this was the case. (Back in my climbing days, I would often run the webbing over the edge and then down-climb a bit to get on rappel.)
After that rappel, we had to down-climb even more. As we were both getting tired, I rigged another rappel to get us past another section which appeared to be difficult to down-climb. As it was, somewhat before that spot, I had scouted downward a bit and told my wife that the way looked doable. She asked me how in the heck I got down off the large boulder that she was on; I pointed out a hand jamb that I had used so that I could friction my feet down the rock.
Down-climbing finally became somewhat easier as we approached Fish Creek. But, just before we got to the creek, we strapped on our headlamps because it was getting dark.
Fish Creek had some pools that appeared to be at least three feet deep. We managed to work our way around these pools, getting our feet only slightly wet.
The walk back to our car ended up being 2.5 miles on the road. We left our headlamps on so that cars would see us. In total, I think we saw about half a dozen cars.
This was my first technical canyon; it turned out to be harder than I expected it to be, mostly due to the amount of down-climbing that we encountered. As mentioned above, however, it's quite possible that we missed seeing an easier way to descend in some spots. Also, due to past climbing injuries, I generally do not jump - ever. I always look for a way to do a static descent. There were several spots that would have been easier had I been willing to jump even a few feet. |
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