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Trip Report: Canyoneering in Zion NP (page 6)
All photos by Todd unless otherwise noted.

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The unrelenting canyon pace is beginning to wear a bit on the team and Steph decides to spend the day hammocking while Tom, Aaron and myself head towards the canyon du jour. Tom has been in this one before, but isn't quite sure about the lengths of the drops, so we arm ourselves with a 200' rope and 200' pull cord.
A rappel from a sling around a tree brings us into the narrows. This was the longest rappel of the canyon at about 150 feet.
 
The canyon is dry, which means a welcome respite from the soggy neoprene of the last few days.
 
There are some nice sculpted walls in the background as Aaron stylishly descends the third rappel.
 
This is the same rappel, looking back up canyon, unfortunately, it's not so scenic. At this rap, a tree (which you can see in the lower, center of the frame) had fallen into the canyon and stuck in an inverted position. The root ball that you pass over on rappel makes a very wobbly platform.
 
Turns out the group before us didn't use rap rings and the webbing at several drops is almost worn through. We spend some time replacing webbing and add a few rings.
In Memoriam: Don't worry, Tom is ok, this was the last canyon for the 200' rope in this picture. If you look carefully in lower left frame of the photo you can see the fuzzy ball where the rope is core shot (you can also see we rigged it on the pull strand otherwise Tom wouldn't be smiling quite so broadly).
 
Bored of photos of people rappelling, I look around for other subjects. The canyon walls are certainly nice enough.
 
We reach the final rappel and are in a hurry to get down due to a very large, dead and smelly snake that sits just up canyon. With the pretext of taking photos of the others from below, I convince the them to let me go down first, then have to dig out my camera to add credence to my story.
With the interesting portion of the canyon behind us, we spend the remainder of the hike slogging away in the afternoon heat paying off the price of admittance.
 
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