Email this article
Reasoning Through A Riddle
A newbie ropes in for the ultimate escape: canyoneering
It was a sunny day in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and I was wedged precariously between two 30-foot
sandstone cliffs, my foot smeared on one, my posterior on the other. I was trying to get a look at what lay ahead: a
short but tricky rappel, the first in this narrow mile-long canyon.
I contorted like a circus acrobat and inched higher, craning my neck. No dice: I couldn't see a damn thing. Such is
life in the slender, voluptuously sculpted canyons of southern Utah.
A few feet ahead of me, a fellow canyoneer, Sarah, lowered herself off a corner of rock and disappeared. My turn. I
maneuvered myself to the edge of the rock, sat down in a perfectly butt-sized depression, and fed the rope into my
belay device. With my right hand, I gripped the rope as I prepared to inch off the rock.
"On belay?" I asked Sarah, who held the end of the rope just in case I had a momentary lapse of judgment and let go
of my brake hand.
"Belay on!" she called back, a disembodied voice from below.
"Rappelling!" At this point, the canyon took a hairpin turn to the left and plunged downward. To avoid the opposing
wall, I had to perform a spiral move, lowering myself while spinning toward the left. I slowly loosened my grip on
the rope and let it slide through my belay device. No sweat, I thought, plunging into a cave-like room of rock.
Suddenly the friction on the rope increased, and I stopped abruptly about 5 feet off the ground. After a moment of
confusion, I realized what had happened: The end of my braid was jammed in my belay device. I was inextricably,
embarrassingly stuck. Oops.
"Um, I'm stuck," I said calmly, even though the prospect of losing a significant amount of hair and scalp was mildly
panic-inducing.
"What's that?" answered Sarah, equally calmly.
"Hair!" I squeaked, tightening my right-hand death grip on the rope. Kevin, another canyoneer who happened to be
within earshot - and unusually tall - came to my rescue. He propped me up on his shoulder to take the weight off the
rappel device as I wrangled with the suicidal braid. I finally yanked it free, tucked it safely behind me, and
lowered myself down. Clearly I wasn't the most precocious of canyoneering students.
It was an inauspicious start, but that did little to squelch my golden retriever-like enthusiasm for the task at
hand: learning the ins and outs of canyoneering during a three-day course taught by Rick Green, owner of Excursions
of Escalante, and Rich Carlson, founder of the American Canyoneering Association. After all, it was a balmy Friday in
mid-September and we were in the midst of a veritable smorgasbord of tantalizing canyons.
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is an ideal spot to practice canyoneering: The 1.9-million-acre
playground of public lands is crisscrossed with chasms as narrow as soccer balls and taller than multi-story
buildings. It is in the center of a vast network of public lands that sprawl across southern Utah and offer countless
opportunities to disappear into the secret folds of the earth, from Zion and Bryce National Parks to the Bureau of
Land Management tracts near Hanksville. That was precisely why I was here: to learn how to escape into these pockets
of rock and behold for myself the strange and famed wonders I had seen only in photographs.
That Friday had started out innocuously enough. We gathered early in the morning at Excursions of Escalante's office,
a squat house on the east side of the dusty burg of Escalante, Utah. Amie Fortin, the outfit's chipper, pint-sized
leading lady and guru of all things organizational, fitted each of us 10 students with gear: gloves, iced water
bottles, packs, and bright orange helmets that weren't particularly becoming.
Rick and Rich then corralled us in the backyard to talk safety, ethics, and basic knots. Like many canyoneers, Rich
first started canyoneering by accident. In the late 1970s, he worked as a traveling pinball-machine salesman,
traipsing across the West in search of sales. Driving between Denver and Salt Lake City, he noticed beautiful
landscapes and figured he ought to wander around for a while. An avid rock climber, he explored the canyons by
whatever skills and means he could muster; soon exploring these chasms became an obsession. Now in his 50s with a
reddish-white mop of hair, a laid-back attitude, and a potbelly hard won with beer appreciation, he has hundreds of
canyon descents under his belt and can still climb like a gecko.
Rick, a medium-height, muscular guy with Pat Sajak hair and the pep of a Little League coach, came to the sport some
20 years ago and, like many pioneering American canyoneers, simply improvised as he explored his way through southern
Utah's canyons. Over the years, pioneers like Rick and Rich vetted and time-tested techniques, and several years ago,
the American Canyoneering Association assembled this accumulated knowledge in order to teach it to up-and-comers such
as myself. The increase in interest in the sport is exactly why Excursions of Escalante began offering courses in
canyoneering skills this year.
In fact, interest in canyoneering has grown considerably. In a matter of a few years, membership in the ACA has grown
from a couple thousand to 5,000, and the appeal has broadened from an almost entirely young, professional, male
demographic to one that attracts more women, young'ens, and older folk. The 10 of us students hailed from Denver,
Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Durango. There was Angus, a 21-year-old string-bean-skinny whippersnapper who had some
canyoneering experience and an alarming amount of enthusiasm, three young professionals from Las Vegas, an engineer
from Salt Lake City, a local middle-aged couple, and Greg, a game software developer in his mid-60s who was indulging
his wife Lonna, who had long dreamed of canyoneering.
After learning to tie a number of knots, like figure-eights, clove hitches, and munters, we hopped into our cars to
caravan out to our first canyon. I clambered into the back seat of Rich's yellow Jeep, and he took off as if behind
in an Indy race. He hammered on the gas pedal, rattled over ruts and bumps, then came to an abrupt and screeching
halt. He slammed the car in reverse and shot backwards, catapulting the three of us in the back seat forward. He
opened his door, snatched a glass bottle from the dirt, and tossed it into the passenger's seat.
"Leave the canyons cleaner than you found 'em," he said by way of explanation. "Good karma." With a shriek of the
tires, he took off once again.
Not a few minutes later, we parked in a wash and unfolded ourselves from the Jeep. It seemed an unceremonious spot: I
could see only monochromatic desert and hear little but the faint rustle of wind in the junipers. Only a few dozen
yards away, however, lay the entryway to Bobo, a mile-long water-sculpted crack in the earth where we'd practice our
rappelling, down-climbing, and beauty-appreciation skills.
"The good news is that rappelling isn't rocket science," Rich announced as we gathered at the top of the slabby
incline of our first rappel. "Otherwise, we wouldn't let Rick do it." Rick grinned.
"The first and most important rule is never ever ever ever ever let go of your brake hand," he said. "Repeat after
me: Never ever ever ever ever let go of your brake hand. There are four evers in there."
Rappeling, I found, was both a piece of cake (when my hair wasn't stuck) and a suspension of disbelief. Walking off a
cliff - or even an incline - backwards with only one hand as your lifeline seemed a bit unintuitive. But, as I
discovered, there was plenty of friction and sometimes I virtually had to force the rope through the belay device to
lower myself.
We slowly made our way through the canyon by down climbing rocky chimneys and stemming our feet when the canyon floor
became a v-shaped intersection of two cliffs. Moki steps - centuries-old indents that Puebloan people used to clamber
up the canyon walls - appeared in the most improbable of places.
After down-climbing half a dozen little drops and dives, the canyon narrowed to the width of a human being. I shirked
my backpack and clutched it in my right hand as I side-stepped my way through. At narrow spots, I shimmied forward
with my hips and tried to remember not to hold my breath. After 20 yards, we emerged into an opening in the canyon,
our exit, with a just reward: a view over the desert beyond. We hiked our way back up a wide cape of rock - a grand
staircase, indeed - as the sun drooped in the West, casting a warm light over the multihued canyons.
The next day broke just as clear and fresh as the day before, as we gathered at Excursions of Escalante's
headquarters.
"This could be one of the most important things you learn in this course," said Rick, as we gathered in the back yard
for day two's lesson in safety and knots. He was trying to underscore the gravity of flash floods, and he succeeded:
I could feel my blood pressure rising.
"It literally goes from dry sand to a tsunami in about 60 seconds," he added, for good measure. His point was clear:
Canyoneering isn't just about learning the right knots and perfecting the art of rappelling. It's about factoring in
a number of considerations: the shape, size, and color of the clouds above, the size of your canyon and watershed,
and the number of escape options off your proposed route, to name a few.
Still, it was hard to be too terrified later that day, when we caravaned out to an unnamed canyon to practice our
rappelling, belaying, and anchor-building techniques, simply because our classroom was so distractingly beautiful.
The canyons held not even a suggestion of human manipulation - only the stark beauty of the junipers and the ancient,
ever-evolving rock. We dutifully tied and retied our munter knots against trees and rocks, rappelled off our lines,
then scampered up the rocks to try it again, all while appreciating the quietude of our surroundings.
The third day, however, was our day of reckoning. Under a wide sky wrought with charcoal storm clouds, Rick and Rich
considered the risk of a desert tsunami reasonably high and took us to a canyon with plenty of escape routes. They
then put us to work as a team with one objective: make it safely through the canyon.
Though the sport of canyoneering might attract people with a strong streak of individualism and a penchant for
adventure, it is at its essence a team sport. At first, we were a pretty sorry team - talking at once, sighing in
frustration, and going off to try our own methods for setting up anchors. But soon, with some cajoling from Rick and
Rich, we began to understand how it worked: We had to use our individual strengths and skills to seamlessly and
efficiently move through the canyon together. It was the physical equivalent of reasoning through a riddle.
Kevin, one of the strongest, lowered Angus, arguably the most ballsy, down into a pool of water so he could check out
the unknown section that followed. When he discovered it would be easy to down climb the next section, Kevin lowered
Dennis and Lonna and me. I then traveled forward with Angus to plot our next move: a down-climb through a chimney of
rock.
We became so focused on our tasks that it was easy to forget everything else about our lives and the civilized world
above. Most of us were so engaged that the passage of time quickened. After our last rappel down a wide bowl of rock
and into a pool of water, we walked up to the top of the canyon and surveyed the view.
I took a look at myself: I was covered in mud, my shorts were ripped, and my pack had acquired a few new holes, not
to mention I was missing a bit of skin and hair. As I looked over the desert and all those canyons I had yet to
explore, I realized that I didn't really care about all that. In fact, my war wounds felt like badges of honor. I had
made it through my first canyoneering tests not only alive but exuberant. My mind was swimming with knots and
techniques and the information Rick and Rich had packed in there, but more important than that, I felt electrified
with a sense of possibility. After all, a world of canyons awaited.
When not losing her hair in canyons, her skis on powdery mountains, and her pride on a mountain bike, Durango, Colo.-based freelance writer Kate Siber pens stories about travel, outdoor gear, and the environment. Find her at katesiber.com.
Post a comment
insideoutsidemag.com doesn't necessarily condone the comments here, nor does it review every post.
Read our full policy.
