Canyoneering!

Today we went Canyoneering. We booked a full day guided expedition with the Zion Adventure Company. Our guide, Stephen, was a young guy from Arizona who loved to climb and explore the outdoors. It was pretty cool because nobody else booked a canyoneering trip for that day, so it was just Katie and I.

Stephen gave us the choice between two canyons. Both of them were rated 3 (out of 4) in terms of difficulty. For reference, the narrows is only rated a 1. The first option was a wet canyon, which meant there would be sections where we would have to wade through water. The second option was dry canyon with longer rappels.

We went with the wet canyon option. Who doesn’t want to get a little wet? The name of the canyon was called “Yankee Doodle” located in Leeds, UT. Stephen hooked us up with all the canyoneering gear we would need including a helmet, a harness, a “skuttlebutt”, a dry bag, and some fancy canyoneering shoes.

From their headquarters we had about an hour drive to the canyon. Half of that hour was spent on a one lane dirt road carving up and down the backcountry. We finally got there and Stephen gave us a full lesson on how we will be using all the gear.

To enter the canyon we needed to do a short rappel in. Katie went first. It was a pretty weird feeling to just walk backwards over the edge of a cliff trusting your life in a long rope. Being semi afraid of heights I thought we did pretty well for beginners.

We quickly approached the second rappel, and it dwarfed the first one. Stephen fixed the rope to the anchor and threw the slack to the bottom. It sounded like it fell for a least 5 second to the bottom. This rappel had some interesting angles, so we couldn’t really see the bottom.

This time I went first. Stephen did a great job directing us down, as he was pretty much dangling off the edge (with a safety harness). Once I got to the bottom I managed to get some good footage of Katie coming down.

After the rappels we had to do some down climbing. This pretty much involved finding creative ways to apply pressure to the walls and rocks to lower yourself to the ground.

We then started to hit the wet sections. The first part was probably only up to our ankles, but the second part got up as high as our waist. It was pretty freaky taking a step into murky water that you had no idea how deep it actually was. Stephen was very surprised how low the water level was. He was saying how some parts usually required a swim to get to the other side!

About midway through we ate some lunch surrounded by canyon. The entire day we didn’t see a single person despite the destination being a popular choice for canyoneering adventure companies.

Getting pictures in the canyon was pretty difficult because it involved being “hands free” a lot. Stephen actually had a waterproof camera that he was using to get pictures of us in action. I also had my gopro mounted to my helmet. Unfortunately the footage wasn’t so great because we had it tilted down a little too much, but we captured some good moments.

After some more rappelling, downclimbing, wading through water, and sliding on our skuttlebutts we were at the out-point. This was where we had to do a little bit of basic free climbing. Once we got to the top, our car was surprisingly right around the corner.

The total length of the canyon we did was approximately 1.5 miles. Would we ever go again? Yes absolutely! It was TON of fun getting exposed to so many techniques used to explore slot canyons. I cannot imagine how insane it must be to do some of the longer rappels that get up to 300 ft.

We arrived back at headquarters and said goodbye to our awesome guide Stephen. I would highly recommend Stephen H. and the Zion Adventure Company to anyone else interested in canyoneering adventure in Zion.

After that we hit up Oscar’s Cafe for dinner as suggested by Stephen. It surely did not disappoint. Their portion sizes are amazingly huge, and the food was delicious. We also ordered a pitcher of beer, and it came in an urn. It was awesome.