A Walk in the Park

Doing a Grand Canyon river trip is "one of those things" that is on a lot of people's lists, and indeed  - having chased a few rivers around the world - I think it's pretty much the best river trip on the planet for its unique combination of length, variety, beach camping quality, moderate-but-fun whitewater, and continuous jaw dropping beauty.  As such, I - like a lot of river runner types  -have been quick to take up the invitations that have periodically come my way and have been able to do the trip a few times.  And each time I float down the river and stare up at the imposing walls I am further drawn away from the river corridor to the zillions of adventures that lurk up the side canyons.  Additionally, the gear-intensive complexity of a fully-loaded raft trip is always pretty daunting, as is the social implications of the continuous kitty-herding of a 16 person crew.  So when Greg and Mike suggested quickly throwing together a backpack-based canyoneering trip down into the Big Ditch for a week I was all in. 

A permit to float the Grand Canyon is famously difficult to get; for many years it was a lonnggg waiting list, and then they changed to a lottery system that is still quite challenging (unless you are able to pay to play with a commercial guide, and you can go any time....but don't get me started....).  And even a backpacking permit can take up to three weeks to get.  But Greg and Mike talked to the backcountry rangers who were personally pretty excited about the trip that Greg was proposing so they got us a permit in....a day. 

The fundamental route is thus:  drive to Kanab, Utah and it's little sibling Fredonia just across the border, head west a bit on the highway to Colorado City, turn back south on ever-deteriorating "roads" to access the south rim at the top of 150 Mile Canyon (150 miles downstream from the Lee's Ferry river put in), hike/wade/grovel/scramble/rappel down 150 to Upset rapid, go upstream and cross over to the river's south bank, go up the famous Matkatamiba Canyon (and add in a coupla gems up that way), cross up and over to the east to Olo Canyon, descend Olo back to the river, float back down to 150, and hike/wade/scramble/grovel - but not rappel  -your way back up 150 to the escape pod. 

Our journey began with a stop at the World Headquarters of the largest canyoneering equipment dealer in the United States:  Imlay Canyon Gear in Mt Carmel:

Which is right across the street from the car dealership there:

Where owner and legendary canyon Rat Tom Jones was kind enough to rent us GC-friendly pack rafts. 

eventually we found ourselves at the precipice:

and started the long descent to the river. 

the canyon got nicer as we dropped into the Redwall Limestone:

and eventually we got to The Goods

150 mile canyon has five short rappels:

And lots n lots of waist-deep wading

along with plenty of good glorious walking

Because we were coming back up this canyon, we needed the ability to get our rope up and anchored at the rappels, and we used a new (to us) technique of creating a continuous loop of light/thin paracord that we could eventually tie our working rope to in order to run it up and through the anchor.  We really needed that cord to be there upon our return, so we left a little note just in case someone felt compelled to clean up the canyon a bit:

The going got a little challenging when we had to take us and our big packs under an overhang with razor-sharp limestone to cushion our knees:

and eventually landed on the nice sandy beach, where we listened to the thunder of the Upset hole for the night

To go up river we had to climb a hundred feet out of the canyon, using our rappel line from the night before as a safety line:

We had to evaluate if we were going to be willing to solo this later upon our return to 150 mile; it's got a couple of 5.7 moves, and if we'da been smart we'da brought a coupla nuts or cams which would make it a lot more pleasant.

To our first pack raft use

Despite our enthusiasm for pack rafting and our considerable investment in this activity, we didn't have the GC-appropriate boats.  These are from Supai Adventure gear, and they are kind of a cross between the boats that we are accustomed to and.....an air mattress.  It's a good example of Yvon Chouinard's favorite axiom, from the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

and indeed, there isn't much to be taken away from these "boats!"  But they worked to get us across the river, with some effort:

And we carried on upstream on a bit of a goat (actually, sheep) path

At Matkatamiba we bumped into some river runners, as we expected to, and they were pretty amazed to see people on foot down there

and no doubt thought we were idiots for having such big packs!  

We found ourselves at a bit of an awkward time; mid-afternoon was too early to call it for the day, but possibly too late for the obvious adventure that loomed a coupla hours away:  Panameta Canyon.  With much discussion about wisdom, prudence, and how they do and don't relate to adventure, we dropped our camping gear and marched off

upper MatKat, on the way to the spot where the walls break down to allow escape and then traverse back around on the bench.  

upper MatKat had its own share of obstacles; Mike wondering how we are going to get around this'n.

Up on the mesa above the canyons there's a pack of wild burros

pretty good camo

These guys are good/bad; it's amazing that they can survive in such an inhospitable place with so little water, but to survive they pretty much decimate the local flora.  

Eventually we found ourselves looking into Panameta

and again discussed the wisdom of dropping into a canyon at 6:00 in the evening, but drop in we did;

Panameta is famously cold due to it's shady-watered swims

No-drysuit boy was chillin.....

But all went well and we did the last 200 foot rappel sequence just as it was getting too dark to see, then bumbled back down the bouldery canyon to our gear cache. 

Whenever we have had to the opportunity to climb the Grand Canyon's peaks, the resultant awesomeness has been super worthy.  Mt Akaba looms a few thousand feet over Panameta, and we had to give 'er a go

the route goes generally right up to the summit block

and indeed it was super worthy. started with a steep hillside, with great views of Mount Sinyela poking out of the esplanade a few miles away: 

some sketchy scrambling got us up

we called that rock I'm grabbing the Aron Ralston rock; it was a mandatory full body grab and was barely held in place by a flake....

and indeed it was a worthy goal:

Mike making the final summit move

Greg taking it all in

The can for the summit register was small:

And we were amazed to see that the first party to register there included brother Paul's (and Jeannie Wall's) old friend Mark Ulm, but in the 20 years since then only 10 parties were in the register

the entirety of the last 20 years of ascents. 

It was a good reminder of how far "out there" we were!  (ironically, this hike is described in the "Hikes from the River" guidebook!  Apparently not too many folks take him up on it....)

The gratuitous summit shot:

Mike pondering life from on high. 

  In order to "save time" (ie an excuse to do something dumb) we took a shortcut down to camp that we hoped would accommodate our 200 foot rope; we needed both the cliff to dip down enough and the rubble pile below to poke up high enough.

"did the rope hit the ground?"  I think so!  

some rockfall as we were rapping off the summit did a bit of damage to the rope:

and the sharp limestone did a bit of damage to clothes:

blown trow on day 3 is sub-optimal!

back to camp:

We called our camp "Donkey Piss Pool"; it kept us alive for days. And I haven't gotten sick from it....yet.....

There were some culinary delights:

the all natural tortillas didn't fare as well as I'd hoped...

but the extraordinary calorie content of "corn, oil, and salt" kept me going...

the next move was to follow the Sinyela fault over to Olo Canyon.  Some pretty challenging "hiking" with full packs:

got us up onto a nice mesa

that eventually led down into the canyon

the fault continues on the other side of the canyon over to Keyhole Canyon, which was a potential destination....next time

Is there a way in there?

with a rope, anything can happen 

and down into Olo we went. 

I got a chance to practice my weighted pilates:

God forbid I might get my footies wet!

To a great camp on the first shelf above the river:

In the morning we did the final move to get to the last rappel to the river

God forbid that Mike might get wet....with his dry suit on!

And we got back in boats

for the 4-5 mile float back down to Upset rapid.  If you know the Grand Canyon you may remember - likely not! - that there's a tiny rapid at the mouth of Matkat; for reference on boat-ability, there was no way that we were going to float through that with our crafts!  

back at 150 mile we started back up the canyon, again marveling at the beauty, this time looking upstream:

and doing a fair number of the skitchy moves again:

We dug up the food that we'd cached in there a few days prior:

and then tried out the system we'd learned to hopefully ascend the rappels

I'm a little dubious!

And it worked!

Is that gonna hold?!!? 

There was a fine camp up out of the gorge:

and a few more hours of trundling up the canyon brought us to a nice spring:

Before the last push up to the rim.  

The adventure wasn't quite over there:

why do we have such a hard time remembering to put fix-a-flat in the rental cars we get for these adventures?  

A great loop by any standard, made that much better by a coupla the best pards ever.  Thanks again to Mike and Greg for a great trip (and to Greg for finding his ahtsy side in taking a lot of great pics here!).  

The Opus Hut

o·pus

ˈōpəs/

noun

1. any artistic work, especially one on a large scale.

I was super psyched when I got the email way back in August: "You are cordially invited to our OPUS Hut trip in the San Juans March 30 - April 2, 2018."  I'd heard about the Opus hut in Colorado's San Juan mountains before but not much beyond that it was high and awesome, and the terrain was such that it was in a pretty avy prone area so going late season  - after hopefully, things had stabilized - would be perfect.  Ryan McDermott was the protagonist, which made it even better; I'd been hearing about Ryan for years due to his adventurous enduro exploits and his legendary nice-guyness, and the rest of the crew I either knew already or by reputation knew them to be to fun and strong lads/lasses.  

Time marched on, and as the trip approachethed, my enthusiasm began to wane a little; some of the great folks I knew on the crew were bailing (including Ashley, due to work intensity) and as meager as our winter has been in Utah, the Four Corners areas were getting an unusually raw deal:  most of the Southwest has been sitting at 50% snowpack, and there has literally been no more than a coupla feet on the ground at nearby reporting ski resorts.  But in many cases some snow is enough snow, the Opus hut is high, and we are always game for some silly adventures in a new place, so off we went.  

The Opus hut is perched above the gravel road that goes over Ophir pass between the small town of Ophir (a drainage south, and up above Telluride) and the Red Mountain pass highway that goes between Silverton and Ouray.  Getting there involves a 3.5 mile hike in up the road, which goes pretty fast since in addition to your ski gear all you need is lunch food and a sleeping bag liner (dinner, breakfasts, and comforters are provided).  And once there....well, the Opus "hut" is a far cry from the yurts of the Tetons or the Sawtooths.  

Inspired by the high mountain chalets of Europe, Bob (he doesn't need a last name) spent 5 years working on buying a mining claim,and then  - without needing approvals from the Forest Service, since he bought the claim  -he spent another few years using a snowcat to haul materials in and used his experience building custom homes in Ophir and Telluride to build a pretty incredible place.  I am usually not that impressed by any building, but the attention to detail and artistry of the Opus hut is hard to miss.  As Aaron Smith put it:  "Even the stairs are perfect; they don't creak!"  

Bob has been in the Telluride area since the beginning of time, and is as great a ski info resource as he is a builder. 

But as nice as the hut is, the skiing is better, as long as there is indeed good stability, because it's big:

barren:

And steep

 in those parts!  

Our first afternoon of skiing was a bit thin (and brother Paul had one of his "best crashes ever", splitting his tips and diving steeply down across a scree patch!) but it gave us a sense of the "main" terrain across the road and up the aptly-named Paradise Valley

Where our dozen-strong crew set upon itself the hefty task of skiing just about all the steep lines to be had.  And while indeed the snow was thin:

there was just enough snow blown into couloirs and onto lee slopes to get both some steep chalky-powder chuting 

 and long fun corn lines:

As we crawled up to various ridges, a few sights leapt out at us:

This thousand foot couloir dubbed "King Kong" just begged to be skied

the snow was supportable enough for solid booting

I wanted to put the booter in so I'd get first tracks! (tho it didn't matter at all)

hungry to bite the King

And it was steep enough to make brother Paul look burly!

Blake hails from Utah County, and clearly the Timpanogos and Cascade ridge areas have had an influence on him, since he skis the steeps with a smooth, very casual grace:

Another chute we spied split the summit of South Lookout peak, and though it wasn't quite as long or as steep, the aesthetics were definitely there

Blake showing the way towards our primary goal, with a little gem to slay en route

It took a bit of work to get to the big one, including sniveling down a line that barely went

And once in, the line was as sublime as we'd hoped

At the end of the day we had a good 1200 foot grind out of the valley back up to the hut:

the snow was even thinner at the lowest elevation of about 10,500

And we were always happy to finally stumble in:

Paul and I posing for the gratuitous Voile shot; there were Chargers, Vectors, V6's, and Objectives on the trip, and all worked just fine across the range of conditions and terrain we had.  

Part of the evening hut time was of course planning out the next day:

Ryan and Rob plotting

and after plotting, Ryan was always the first to be ready to go in the morning. 

Aaron and I had spied another, more subtle line splitting the E face of South Lookout:

And we tried to boot up it late in the day, but were turned back since it had already iced up (and had to go to a plan B, which wasn't bad:

 But the next morning Paul and Rob and I went back up there and skinned up the fatter line to lookers left to where you could traverse into the thinner line, and I booted on up.  Once on top, it was intimidating:

I didn't measure it, but it was steep enough that I was being quite careful with each turn, and in the choke it was only a bit wider than my ski length...but it was much softer than the afternoon before. 

I had also kinda forgotten that 13,000 feet is a lot different than 9-10,000, and I kept being surprised at how worked I was getting skiing down these runs (and how tiring it is skiing steeps; this high-avy year has kept me skiing a lot of low-angle noodly stuff).  'Radoans love to talk about their elevation ("Well, I live at 8500 feet, so....") but it does indeed take a bit more outta ya.  

So after 3 days of solid chuting and corn harvesting on barely enough snow we zipped back down to the highway, letting the next crew have their shot at creating their art on the Opus's indeed large scale. 

Thanks again to Ryan for having the vision to organize the trip last summer and inviting a fun, strong, and interesting crew to rattle around some new mountains for a few days.  and thanks to Aaron for taking most of the pics here (at least, all the good ones!).  

Boycott CamelBak, Giro, and Bell?

In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting there's been the typical flurry of talk about gun control and the flaccid, uninspired, and insincere pledges of "prayers and thoughts for the victims and their families" by the Republican lawmakers who will simply wait for the furor to die down and be replaced by the next awful political story du jour (it seems like it's been done with the inexplicable demand for higher steel and aluminum tariffs that will likely result in the inflation that the bad tax bill was supposed to prevent??!).  But for a coupla reasons, this time the conversation seemed to have some good traction, partly due to otherwise-average high school kids becoming incredibly inspiring and impassioned and leading the conversation, with even Trump telling lawmakers they were afraid of the NRA (even after he has lunch with the NRA leadership and claims that they are ok with reforms that they definitely are not?!?).  And Dick's Sporting Goods - a big gun dealer - joined WalMart in announcing new limitations on gun sales.  

The last week I got this article calling for a boycott of Bell and Giro bike helmet/accessory brands and CamelBak, because they are owned by Vista Outdoor, an Ogden, UT-based company that owns A LOT of other companies, including Serengeti (sunglasses), Bushnell (binocs and such), Blackburn (bike accessories), Camp Chef, and a bunch of brands I've never heard of before because they are hunting and tactical brands, including one that is an automatic rifle maker.  Calling for a boycott of those non-gun brands on went semi-viral on social media, and last week REI announced that they were halting all orders from those brands.

Now, I'm as nutcake left wing liberal as they come, and even though I grew up with a fancy gun case full of rifles owned in our living room owned by my NRA-member father, I am not a fan of guns at all and love to remind people that guns cause over 13,000 deaths annually in the US and relative to most of the rest of the world (except Latin America) our deaths per 100,000 people the US is awful, esp as compared to most other countries of similar economic status.  And anything that can be done to limit 'mericans' ridiculously-easy ability to buy all sorts of guns is  - in my mind - a good thing.

But boycotting such "wholesome" (my term) brands as Giro, Bell, and CamelBak because they are part of a portfolio of a really big company?  That seems like a stretch.  Though I have worked with CamelBak in the past and have friends who have worked for/with Giro and Bell I don't know any details of their relationship with their parent company, but typically the many outdoor brands that are owned by big conglomerates (and there are many) basically "rely" on their parents for very little besides capital and maybe distribution help.  The companies that are acquired are typically run completely independently from their parents, who wisely know that they are buying a good asset that doesn't need a lot of mucking with.   Apparently REI's announcement "caused" Vista's stock to drop....in the same week that the entire stock market dropped.

For sure, this is a huge deal for those brands; I have long decried the fact that REI has way too much influence over the industry and has singlehandedly stymied a lot of innovation, but for better or worse they can make or break brands' success or failure.  Therefore, a quarters-worth of halted orders by REI can bring a company to its knees.  And perhaps that's what consumers want:  CamelBak, Giro, and Bell hurt so badly that Vista actually "cares" and changes its tack on its tactical brands and congressional lobbying. But what about the brands themselves?  Will righteous mountain bikers be stoked when they find out that CamelBak or Bell/Giro is laying off 20% of its workforce?   Those are people who likely feel just as strongly about gun control as you and I do, and they would/will be losing their jobs in sort of funky economic areas for something that is far, far beyond their control. 

After 9/11 my 80-odd year old step dad put an American flag sticker he bought for $1.98 at a 7-11 on the bumper of his Subaru.  I asked him why, and he said "Well hell, it's the least I can do!"  And I had to agree:  there was literally nothing he could do that would have less of an effect on anything than putting a sticker on his car.  So if you are in the market for a new helmet or hydration pack and buy yourself a Poc or an Osprey in deliberate accordance with boycotting Giro/Bell or CamelBak that's fine (those are good brands/products too) but don't gag too hard in the smug cloud that has formed over your head; you aren't saving any kids from the next mass shooting, and in fact you are hurting some companies that have been dedicated enough to the industry that they are hands-down the leaders in their categories despite being owned by big conglomerates, not because of them.  And if you feel really good about your politically-correct purchase, keep in mind that many other brands in the outdoor sphere quietly make significant chunks of their income by selling products to the over-funded US military, which has historically put a lot of effort into the business of killing people. 

There is no doubt that the proletariat can make waves with protests and boycotts. But these days the way to really affect some change is twofold:  vote for candidates you like, and support them financially.  If you do indeed feel strongly about changing our gun control laws, spend a little less time deciding between Osprey and Salomon packs and a bit more time writing your congressman or woman and tell them that if they don't support more gun control laws (for example:  reinstating the assault weapons ban that was in place from 1994 to 2004) they will NOT get your vote or your $$.