Thursday Adventure: Sleeping God Canyon, New Zealand

Hope everyone had a wonderful New Years!  Before launching into this week's adventure, a reminder: today is the last day to participate in Teresa Frohock's little "Guess the Author's Gender" experiment!  All 10 writing samples are up - comment with your guess as to the author's gender, and you've got a chance to win a pile of free books.  But hurry, because comments close tonight at 9pm EST.  The Big Reveal will happen on Monday Jan 7.  (And hey, because I love my blog readers, I'll even give you a hint: one of the samples is mine. Can you figure out which one?)

This week's adventure continues the Hobbit-inspired theme of Spectacular New Zealand.  Last time, I shared pics from kayaking on Milford Sound on the South Island; this time, I'll jump to the North Island, and share pics from a canyoneering trip my husband and I did in Sleeping God Canyon.

Sleeping God Canyon, from the bottom.  

Sleeping God is a steep and dramatic canyon with lots of waterfalls, pools, and abseils (rappels).  It's about 2 hours from Auckland, over on the Coromandel Peninsula in the Kauaeranga Valley.  My husband and I were particularly excited to give NZ canyoneering (or "canyoning," as Aussies and New Zealanders call it) a try, since "wet" canyoneering involves a bit of a different skill set than the dry Utah canyons we usually descend.  Since we didn't want to haul all our canyoneering gear from the US to NZ (our baggage was heavy enough as it was, with all our backpacking equipment!), we signed up for a guided trip with CanyonZ. Our two guides, Neil and Bertrand, were great - they treated us as partners rather than sheep to be herded, and gladly shared their knowledge of tips and tricks for wet canyon descents.  Oh, and Neil in particular had  a wicked sense of humor - always a plus. The group was nice and small, too: only 4 paying clients.

Suiting up at the start of the trip.  We wore full-body wetsuits, harnesses, and helmets while descending the canyon.  The water is pretty freaking cold!

The trip starts with a brisk 40-minute hike up the Kauri trail to the head of the canyon.  Then you pick your way down along the river to the first waterfall, and the fun begins!

Setting up for the rappel of the first waterfall.  The views out over the valley are spectacular.

Woo hoo!  Nothing like rappelling next to (or sometimes IN) pounding water.

You have to step carefully, because the rock is insanely slick

The rock has all these interesting "stair-step" features

Rappelling down the second fall

Fraenzi demonstrates the faster way to get down. (She's doing a flip. Don't worry, she didn't land on her head.)

Rainbows abound in the canyon

So many beautiful waterfalls!

It's important to practice setting "guided rappels" when descending large waterfalls - you don't want to land directly in the water beneath the fall, as you can easily get sucked under and drown.

I had to do this rappel with my eyes closed, lest my contacts get washed straight out of my eyes.  Made for a bit of an extra challenge. 

Zipline descents are fun, too.

Our little gang at the end of the trip: Chris, Neil the Guide (would you trust your life to this man?), Andre, Fraenzi, me, and Robert.  

Thursday Adventure: The Subway (Zion National Park)

In the fall, my thoughts always turn to canyoneering. Crisp desert air, golden-leafed cottonwood trees lining the washes, azure sky without a single lurking thunderstorm to trouble the would-be canyoneer...ahhh.  This fall I'm particularly caught up in dreams of Utah's red-rock desert, as I gear up to start work on the third book of the Shattered Sigil series.  As you might guess from my working title (The Labyrinth of Flame), I'm planning a little canyon fun for Dev and Kiran this time around.

I've shared some canyoneering pics here before, but mostly from dry desert slots.  Zion National Park features a different style of canyoneering than much of the rest of Utah.  Zion's canyons feature full-flowing streams, and require a lot more swimming and wading in addition to scrambling and rappelling.  Some experienced canyoneers scoff at Zion's popular routes as being "kiddie rap-n-swim canyoneering," since most of the major canyons have bolts placed in the rock at all the rappel points, and require little in the way of anchor-setting skills.  (In the rest of Utah, canyoneers hold to a "no bolt" ethic, to maintain the wilderness feel of the canyons.)  But Zion's canyons are so beautiful, I don't see how anyone can possibly sneer at them.  To prove it, here are some pics from a trip I did through one of Zion's most popular canyoneering routes: the Subway (a.k.a the Left Fork of North Creek).

Swirling slickrock on the hike to the canyon

Walking down the slickrock

Fall colors in the canyon

Preparing to negotiate a drop. (I'm the one in front, my husband Robert behind, followed by two other friends.)

Thursday Adventure: Leprechaun Canyon (North Wash, Utah)

Since last week's adventure was among the heights, this week I thought I'd plunge into the depths...of a slot canyon, that is.  My husband and I love canyoneering, because it combines climbing, hiking, orienteering, adventure, and problem-solving in a way few other sports do. Plus, you get to visit some seriously remote areas - it's pretty neat to stand looking out over a vast panorama of slickrock desert and see not a single sign of human habitation (no trails, nada).  And yes, I'm happy to report there are still plenty of places in the US with zero cell phone coverage, where it is impossible for even the smartest of phones to check email or access the internet.  (Even satellite phones don't work in deep canyons!)

Leprechaun Canyon (the slot is so skinny and deep you can't actually see it in the photo, only the more gently sloped upper walls of the canyon)

Of course, that means when we go canyoneering, we are never, ever blase about safety.  Neither of us ever attempts a canyon alone - in fact, we prefer a team of 4 or more people; that way if someone gets injured, one person can stay with injured party while others go for help.  (4+ people also means you can use "human pyramid" techniques to escape particularly nasty potholes or other obstacles in the canyon.)  We carry a bolt kit (only for use in emergencies, since we agree with the "no bolt" ethic favored by most U.S. canyoneers), and we always arrange a "drop dead" time with a friend back home - if we don't contact the friend by this time, they call the local search and rescue.  (Much as I admire Aron Ralston for his guts in sawing his own arm off, the whole ordeal would never have been necessary if he'd taken any of the basic precautions most canyoneers do.  For a story of how experienced canyoneers get out of a sticky situation, check out this tale from an attempted descent of Sandthrax, an extremely dangerous/difficult canyon not far from Leprechaun.) 

Leprechaun Canyon is a relatively short but strenuous little slot adventure in the remote North Wash area of southeastern Utah.  You drive out to the middle of nowhere and car-camp in a sandy wash:



Car-camping near Leprechaun. (We had 5 people on this trip: myself, my husband Robert, and our friends Khurrum, Catherine, and Jason)

Then you hike across trail-less slickrock up to the canyon's head:

Robert and Khurrum navigating across slickrock to Leprechaun's head

Once at the head, you scramble down into the canyon.  Sometimes by rappelling, sometimes via simple "stemming" - a climbing technique where you brace opposite feet & hands against the canyons walls, as shown in the picture below:

Khurrum shows off his stemming skills near Leprechaun's head

From there you squeeze and wriggle and squirm through the canyon:

Khurrum and Catherine squeezing through the slot

And occasionally rappel drops that can't be downclimbed:

Catherine rappeling a drop

(The rappeling is where the problem-solving part most often comes in: you need to figure out a way to anchor the rope safely without using bolts (which don't hold well in soft sandstone anyway). Looping the rope around chockstones, rock protrusions, etc, works best; or in a pinch, you can even bury a pack deep in the sand to use as an anchor, or use body-anchor techniques).

And as a reward, you get to see cool stuff like this:

Sculpted narrows in lower Leprechaun

Standing in Leprechaun's "subway" section: Catherine, Khurrum, Robert, me

And to top it off, once back at camp you get to see sunsets like this:

Sunset after a long day canyoneering

I tell you, I can't wait for our son to be old enough to travel technical canyons with us.  (He's already old enough for us to hike through non-technical canyons...we're hoping to do a family trip out to Little Wild Horse canyon in the San Rafael Swell this fall.)

Thursday Adventure: Larry Canyon (Utah)

My husband first introduced me to canyoneering (or canyoning, as it's called in his home country of Australia), having descended several of the narrow sandstone gorges in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney.  Of course, the wet, lushly vegetated canyons of the Blue Mountains, full of waterfalls and glow worms, are quite different than the arid, sculpted slots of the American southwest.  But the idea is the same: you start at the canyon's head and work your way down, rappelling down any drops too steep to downclimb, squeezing over and under obstacles, and thrashing your way through "potholes" still holding water from the last flash flood.  Utah and Arizona have countless remote, beautiful canyons with slots so narrow you have to turn sideways to squeeze through, where the rock has been sculpted by erosion into a fantasia of swirled patterns and knife-edged fins. 

For today's adventure I'm sharing a few pictures from a trip my husband and I did with a friend to Larry Canyon, deep in the remote Robber's Roost area of eastern Utah.  (One of the wonderful things about southwest canyoneering is how remote and wild many of these canyons still are.  You can stand under a fiery sunset looking out over a twisting maze of canyons, and know yourself the only human for miles; feel the vast, ancient silence of the desert, that's as inspiring as it is humbling.)  Larry is one of those canyons with a wonderfully surprising start: one minute you're slogging along a broad, sandy wash, wondering when it's going to get interesting; and all at once, the ground drops away into a deep, narrow slot.

Me rappelling into the slot of Larry Canyon

Then you've got a whole series of mini-rappels, downclimbs, and chockstones to chimney over.  

My husband Robert setting up a rappel

Eventually the canyon widens out into a cathedral-style, sandy-bottomed slot with towering walls.

Deep in Larry Canyon



There's one last optional set of rappels before the canyon broadens out to become a simple hike.

Robert and our friend Jason setting the final rappel

Once in the broad section, you get to climb out the slickrock back up to the plateau above, and find your car again.  (I used to mock people who used GPSs.  Navigation just isn't that hard in the mountains.  But oh man, a GPS is so useful for finding your car again in the undulating maze of slickrock country.)  

Me and Robert climbing out of Larry Canyon

If you want to see any more pics from the trip, you can visit my photo gallery at http://www.courtneyschafer.com/2006_larrycanyon/index.htm