On May 28, 2007, around 11 AM, Peter called me and asked if I wanted to go “hiking”. When he said “hiking” he secretly meant “proto-canyoneering”, but I was game, so off we went. This ended up being me, Erin, Peter, Helen, and Miranda on an ~1.5 mi canyon route, using two cars. It was more or less downhill the whole way (short of the first bit on fireroad), but no major elevation change was involved. The trip was to Cloudburst Canyon, rated by Chris Brennan as “not that hard, but also not that interesting.” But it was kind of cool on its own, and it was good rope practice, I guess.
in our lovely scented exit area
v. dusty downclimb
We parked the first car, then all packed into the second to get to the trailhead. We walked up fireroad for a bit until we found the point where we were supposed to start down the slope. The area is noted by such things as “right after the turn” and “where a piece of road barrier is missing”. There is also a concrete bag retaining wall to locate where you ought to start once you get a couple of feet
off the road.
We began down this crazy bit of slope, covered in thick dirt and fun spiky plants until we see the first point where we are supposed to tie off. We manage to get the rope attached to this tree (admittedly, getting to said tree in the first place was probably the most difficult part of the whole thing), and we rappel/walk down this nasty dusty slope, after which we continues further to the second place where we needed to rappel (or “abseil”. I love that word, but it just still feels kind of funny to use it).
Neither of these rappels were sheer wall or anything, but would have been really unpleasant and probably pretty dangerous to just try to walk down, so I was glad we had the tie in. From that point on, however, it was really just a straight down-canyon walk, with no real trail of course, until we met up with another canyon.
helen on rope (sketchy, rather than a wall)
At that point we get to one of those crazy mayan looking damn things they put in (ok, so sue me, I don’t know squat about Mayans, it’s just the first thing that comes to mind). Anyway, you can either rappel down this thing, or walk around it, which I did instead. There are some interesting cabin foundations around the corner from it. Then we took a wrong turn, figured it out, turned around, and went the right way. At the very end we passed through a area with some amazing, gorgeous, wonderful smelling flowers, and finally made it back to the second car. A good few hours all around.
