Yankee Doodle Slot

July 13, 2009 Near Red Cliffs Recreation Area

The second day of our S Utah Adventure finds us in the early morning hours with Mike, a guide from Zion Rock and Mountain Guides, for a guided family canyoneering adventure. After fitting us all with harnesses, shoes, helmets, and other necessary equipment, we hop in our car and follow him back towards St George to a short slot canyon called Yankee Doodle Slot located at the foot of the Pine Valley Mountains north of St George. Beautiful scenery as we drive through red cliffs, dry juniper forests, and even what appears to be a very old orchard with mostly dead trees, possibly the remains of an old homesteader trying to make it in a very harsh climate.

After spotting his truck at the crossing of a gully and starting to drive down the road, our guide realizes he has left his truck at the wrong out canyon, so we go back and get it and drive a couple miles down the road to position it at the right location (just a trick I'm sure to make the day more exciting by causing us to wonder if he really knows where he's going!). We park a short mile or so down the road, get our gear on, and head for the canyon. A couple hundred yards later, we are on the edge of a narrow canyon cut deeply into the sparsely forested foothills. We sit on a rock ledge above the 30 ft drop into the canyon as Mike instructs us on how to keep from getting hurt while rapelling into the canyon (air - good! rock - bad! It hurts when you run into it). We learn the ropes (literally).

I get to go first, my first time rapelling ever. I get on rope, Mike ties off the safety line, and over the edge I go. Quite exhilirating as you back over the edge and lean back into thin air (air - good!). I walk backwards down the cliff and arrive at the bottom. Off rope, off safety, clear the landing area. Jessica and Sarah proceed to make their way down. Now it is time for Melinda, our timid nine-year old who never does anything risky, who finds a ride on Dad's shoulders nearly more excitement than she can handle. How is she going to do this? We had talked a lot about this in the months before the trip, and she wanted to do it, but now is the moment of truth. How long will Carlynn and the guide have to coax her before she backs over that edge? Will Mike have to come down with her? And then miraculously, she starts coming down, very slowly, very carefully, but no screaming, no whimpering that she doesn't want to do it any more; she just gets on rope, and with Mike's gentle instruction and encouragement, she walks backwards over the edge! And throughout the rest of the day, Mike continued to guide her with firm, but gentle words, to push herself to face her fears and do things that we could hardly believe. Not that she wasn't scared, but Mike somehow got her to do these things in spite of her fear. Seeing Melinda do the things she did was worth the entire trip.

Oh, but wait, there was also incredible scenery, more rapels, and a lot of downclimbing around obstacles and through cracks. All with Mike on the ropes to help each of us according to our needs and to keep us safe. We took a little longer than we were supposed to working our way through the obstacles in the canyon, so we come to the one downside of the day - a 1.4 mile hike up the out canyon in the afternoon sun. In the slot, we were mostly shaded, but here there were just patches of shade as we worked our way up the bottom of the wash. We were down to our last drops of water and close to overheated by the time we made it out to the truck we had spotted. Back in the car with the blessed air conditioning on, we returned to our motel in Sprindale, hot, tired, and scraped up a bit, but reveling in the accomplishments of the day.

Shelf Canyon

Zion NP - July 12, 2009

The first day of our S Utah vacation. After attending church in Hurricane, we milled around the Zion visitor center while waiting to check into the Canyon Ranch Motel in Springdale (a nice value, clean spacious rooms, a shaded grassy area in the middle of the units, clean outdoor pool, friendly managers). After getting settled, we set out in the early evening to check out a hike on the east side of Zion just past the big tunnel. I'd found the description of the Shelf Canyon hike in my months of searching the internet and planning for this trip. It is a half-mile hike into a narrow canyon that narrows down to a slot at the end of the canyon. It is not an official trail, nor signed, nor anything. The mouth of Shelf Canyon is located at the canyon overlook parking lot on the north side of the road about 500 ft east of the canyon overlook trail.



We arrived to a traffic jam due to the presence of a herd of 20 to 30 bighorn sheep on the south side of the road (well, a Zion NP traffice jam, not a Yellowstone traffic jam, which meant about 15 cars filling the small lot). We eventually found space to park, loaded up the packs, and set off to find the trail into the canyon. It was a beautiful evening, 80 degrees or so, shaded by the mountains from the evening sun.

We found the trail down into the canyon on the east side of the canyon, dropping into the canyon from the shoulder of the highway. As we started down we found a couple stray sheep just off the trail.



Once in the bottom of the canyon, we started up the slickrock bottom. The first part of the trail was a mixture of walking in the sandy bed of the wash along with quite a bit of slickrock scrambling as we worked our way back up into the canyon. It narrowed down quite a bit, and there were a few tricky places where you had to work your way up and across fairly steep sandstone faces to get around big boulders or pools. Difficult enough to make it fun and a little exciting. Melinda, our 9-year old was frightened by a few of the passages, but was able to do it with my help. Coming down I used a short length of rope around the girls in one place for safety in case of a slip.








As we progressed up, the canyon narrowed, trees and brush drew in closer, and the walls grew higher. Then suddenly in front of us, the canyon narrowed to a slot. Yes! Just what we were looking for!



We entered the slot, shoulder width at its narrowest, splashed through a short, ankle deep pool, and began climbing broken sandstone boulders as we neared the end of the canyon. After a short scramble, the canyon ends in a narrow, dark slot, with numerous shelfs and ledges, really quite a fun place to explore. And from the dark canyon bottom, you look up past the sheer, red sandstone walls close by on either side of you to the narrow slit of light far above. This is it! This is what we came to explore on this vacation - cliffs and canyons with a unique beauty unlike anywhere else! A great short hike/scamble to start our trip.

To the end of the earth and back....

I went hiking last Saturday to the end of the earth and back. For those who remember the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy", the bushman goes on a long journey to throw the evil Coke bottle off the end of the earth, a big cliff overlooking an expansive valley. Just a couple minutes off the freeway in the middle of Washington is Frenchman Coulee, an amazing place carved out of the basalt by the ice age floods (one of my favorite topics, just ask my kids!). An easy hike takes you up on a basalt rib between two expansive coulees. The rib rises 300 feet above the coulee floor, much of it in sheer basalt columns. A little less than a mile hike takes you to the end of the rib, where you look out over an expansive vista, nearly 360 degrees, from the south alcove of the coulee, down and up the Columbia river, and around to the north alcove, a view rivaling the end of the earth from the movie.

A trip in late April/early May is rewarded by an amazing profusion of wildflowers, my favorite of all being the bitterroot, which pops up seemingly out of bare rock with a delicate beauty that I think is hard to match in any other flower. This is one of my new favorite places!

Why pigburner?

Hmmm, first attempt at blogging, what should I say..... Well, how about an explanation of my unusual user name, pigburner. Where in the world did such a name come from? Several years ago I worked for a company that processed radioactive waste in a glass furnace. One day we got a shipment of slightly radioactive, frozen pigs from a pharmaceutical company. How to get them into the furnace? Would they get squeezed through the auger that pushed the waste into the furnace, or would they jam it up? Everyone had a different opinion, so we just went ahead and tried it. Drop it down the chute. Watch on the video feed as it bounces around. Then it catches in a flight of the screw, starts turning into sausage you might say, and disappears into the furnace. One of the techs says, "I wish the camera were in color!" Oh well, I'm digressing from the point of this entry. We fed the rest of the pigs into the furnace in the same way with no problems. Of course I had to tell my family about the doings at work that day. Some time later, my oldest daughter (probably about 9 or 10 yrs old at the time) was asked what her dad did at work. She promptly recounted the most memorable thing she knew, "He burns radioactive pigs!" And so came about the nom de plume, pigburner.