With just a recommendation and a track from a friend who used to live in the area, I went to check out “Peekaboo Slot Canyon” / “Red Canyon” near Kanab, UT on a solo Kanab road trip. It was a great example of a no expectation side trip to a not-frequently visited destination that I just got to simply take in and be surprised at every turn.
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Hoping to help others and my future self, here is what going to Burning Man in 2023 after a decade break took: $3000 + 80 hrs of searching, thinking, building, prepping and packing.
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It’s drugs, sex and EDM. It’s the world’s biggest inside joke. It’s a playground for rich techies. It’s a place where if you think you can be absurd you have to prove it. It’s extreme camping. It’s a place of radical acceptance, creativity and self expression. It’s the easiest festival to get busted for drugs. It’s transformational. It’s Burning Man.
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Montana has a rich history of resource extraction. The hill in Butte, MT was originally one of the most prosperous sources of copper as the electrification of the US started and WWII demanded this new technology. In 1920, this town (which in 2023 had about 40,000 people) held up to 100,000 people all working around the resource extraction biz until things became harder and harder to extract. Soon, “The Richest Hill” turned into an open pit mine, then a superfund site which kills any bird that lands in the pit’s heavy metal water and now a tourist attraction.
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I spent July 2023 in Montana for work, for a wedding and for fun. One of the opportunities I had was to attend a talk from Jon Sommer head of Colorado mycological society and then go on a short foraging hike with them. This launched me into an experience I’d always wanted to try: eating mushrooms I had foraged from nature!
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Dante’s canyons in Death Valley are some of the longest I’ve heard of at ~5,500 ft of descent and upwards of 20 rappels. They require no approach and almost no exit, but keep you moving in canyon for 10+ hours. I did my two big canyons from Dante’s last year with River Styx (3A IV 22r) and Typhoon (3A IV 24r). This time for NYE we were to do some people’s favorite canyon Hades (Dante’s Variation) (3A IV 27r 200 ft).
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Excited by a past exploration of Fossil Snail Canyon (3A IV 7r 190ft), The Team returned to the fossil laden range to visit Gastropod Casket Canyon (3A IV 8r 200 ft). We found rams horns, gastropods, other fossils, a stiff uphill and cairn-anchor-less canyon.
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Death Valley approaches can feel more dangerous than the canyons themselves, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising given that is how climbing can work too. This trip down to Death Valley after an overnight wind/rain storm, we headed out a little after 8am to hike to the top of Feral Ass Canyon (3A III, 9r, 230ft). We would instead decide to drop into Sentinel Canyon (3A III, 13r, 130ft) which runs along the approach early but still hit 7 rappels, mostly small.
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Out on a recent trip to Red Rock Canyon I was unable to climb due to an injury and was looking for non-4×4 required canyons in the park. I found Hidden Falls Canyon (3A III, 4-11r, 120ft) on ropewiki and thought it looked beautiful and was worth the effort with its rocky watercourses, bouldery washes and endless down climbing.
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I don’t need to tell you that Death Valley is a desolate place, the name says it all. However, its worth emphasizing that while the main roads might be full of people, the canyoneering retains the Wild West attitude of its origins. As I share more about Death Valley canyoneering, there is a worry about more people coming into it with a different mindset than the place allows. This post is as much as an introduction as a warning to what canyoneering in the lowest place on Earth is like. My background is over a dozen Utah canyons and over a dozen Death Valley canyons with ~80 rappels off cairn anchors. For some this is nothing, for others this is everything. In summary, there are three things I think people should know about Death Valley canyoneering: self-sufficiency, cairns and Swaney.
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