20

Canyoneering in Utah

THE FOOT WASN’T designed to take up residence adjacent to the head. It’s affixed to the bottom of the leg for a reason. If there’s any business required up top, that’s what hands are for.

I had pause to consider these fundamentals of human anatomy during an ascent of Peek-a-Boo Canyon in the Escalante region of southern Utah. It’s where canyoneers go when they die and go to heaven. Canyoneers, note. Some Brits refer to canyoneering as canyoning, but the Americans have it right. As with mountains, where I mountaineer, so with canyons.

There are canyons in other parts of the world, even in the UK, but they’re nothing like the canyons of Utah. British canyoneering tends to consist mostly of mooching along a riverbed in cold water between vegetated banks. Things are different over the Pond. The soft sandstone of the southwest was specifically made to be weathered by the elements into all kinds of fantastical shapes, and this has produced a natural playground for a whole host of recreational pursuits.

Harder rock stands proud and tall, forming the buttes and mesas familiar to any fan of John Ford westerns. Softer rock has been gouged out by stream action to form deep fissures or ‘slot canyons’ that are sometimes hundreds of feet deep. Most are dry, although after rain ‘flash floods’ can rapidly fill them to the brim. Some harbour permanent deep pools that need to be swum. Some require rock climbing technique to penetrate. Some are so narrow that they are accessible only to very thin people or not at all.

Eddies of long-disappeared water have sculpted the rock into a variety of beautiful natural features whose intricacy compares with that found in the interior of complex caves. The walls often overlap as they spiral and intertwine above you, like a double helix of DNA. Their mineral-rich rainbow colours are famously photogenic when hit by the sun. Exploring such convoluted places is a cross between scrambling and caving, but in the dry, in the daylight and with zero exposure.

Peek-a-Boo is only one slot canyon among thousands hidden in the complex drainage of the Escalante River system, which is itself only one of many vast river systems. Through-hiking source-­canyons requires multi-day trips with packs, and leaves you a long way from your starting point, often with no easy way back, so this is a specialised activity. More accessible side canyons like Peek-a-Boo are shorter and can be combined with others (up one and down the other) to make a round trip.

Peek-a-Boo’s main draw is its challenging nature. Imagine a sunken series of interlinked potholes, tunnelling through a proce­ssion of overhead arches, lined by swirling fins of rock that overlap and seem to close off the route ahead. Although the narrows are only around half a mile long, they take as long to negotiate as would a rock climb of that length. Yet no rope work is required. As you never leave the canyon floor, you can’t fall. The through-trip is technically no more than a strenuous scramble… but in magical surroundings. It brings back latent memories of what it was like as a child to discover an exciting new playground.

For Sandi and I, even reaching the canyon was an adventure, courtesy of a 26-mile rattle along a dirt track known as Hole-in-the-Rock Road. We arrived at a dusty parking lot, unsurprised to find that our rental car was the only two-wheel-drive vehicle there. A path led down through sand and scrub into Dry Fork Wash and the entrance to Peek-a-Boo, a disconcerting six metres up the wall of the sun-baked wash. Holds had been cut into the rock to facilitate access, so we duly scrambled up and inserted ourselves into the canyon mouth.

The potholes that floored the canyon were more in the nature of saucer-shaped hollows than deep pits. Progress was made by heaving yourself up and over the back rim of one into the bowl of the next higher one. The rock was water-smoothed, with few holds and little purchase, so fingers, elbows and knees were soon grazed.

Peek-a-Boo promenade

Sometimes the next pothole was only a few feet higher. Sometimes it was high enough to require a mantelshelf. And sometimes we had to flail and squirm over the rim in an avalanche of arms and legs and slither into the hollow on our stomachs. As a bonus, this at least enabled me to take compromising shots of Sandi that I could later use as bargaining chips.

The most awkward obstacle was a short, inclined rock chute that curved upwards around a tight hairpin bend between walls that were barely a body-width apart. Inserting head and shoulders around the bend was no problem, but then there were no handholds and no purchase for the feet from which to launch oneself further upwards around the corner against the friction of the rock.

Somehow, by some mode of locomotion that remains a mystery to me, I managed to force my way up in a frenzy of grunts and groans that echoed around the enclosed space. Graciously, I deigned to give Sandi a helping hand up after me. But it was she who was to have the last laugh…

The canyon walls decreased in height and we climbed out into the parched desert. We had ‘hiked’ Peek-a-Boo, but now we had to get back. The standard return route, to prolong the fun, is to make a round trip by descending nearby Spooky Canyon, which was supposed to be less strenuous.

After chimneying down into the upper slot, it turned out to be one of those canyons best suited to short, thin people. The floor was sandy and mostly level, devoid of any difficulty, but the gap between the walls was less than body width and allowed only sideway passage – a claustrophobe’s nightmare. Sandi is shorter than me and managed to squeeze her way along in crablike fashion, but my head would not fit in the narrow space above where hers had passed through. Nor was there sufficient room between the walls, in a sideways position, to bend the knees and crouch down.

While she raced ahead (or so it seemed to me), I side-shuffled back to a slight widening where I could shimmy down to the ground and slither along the floor, pushing my rucksack ahead of me.

I emerged blinking into desert heat to find Sandi standing hands on hips, feigning impatience but grinning from ear to ear. We paused to suck the last drops of moisture from our water bottles then hightailed it back to the car to indulge in some full-on a/c… and search the guidebook for another fix.