Turn On, Tune Out, Drop In: My First Time Canyoneering
It was a warm, sunny October day in Utah when I found myself looking directly down a thirty foot drop-off in the middle of a slot canyon. As an avid rock climber, my brain was trying to reconcile with the fact that I couldn’t climb up this particular rock face to get out of my predicament. Its sandstone surface was too smooth, too crumbly, and anyhow, I would have had to climb down it rather than up. Turning back certainly wasn’t an option - I had rappelled 150 feet just to enter the narrow canyon. So, what was I to do? Jump to the bottom? Sit down and cry? Tell my friends to throw me a great funeral and send them on without me? My mind snapped back from my worst-case-scenario fantasies when one of my friends encouragingly called up from below, “You can do it, Hilary! Just trust your legs and arms!” I looked down at my gangly limbs and couldn’t for the life of me fathom how they could help me down this drop-off. What was I supposed to do with them?
As if reading my mind, my friend Julie down below wriggled her way a few feet up the canyon by leaning back on one of the walls with her back and arms and pushing her feet against the other wall to hold her above the ground. Getting the general idea, I gave her a thumbs-up that was aimed at my own ego more than anything, swallowed my fear, and tried to expand my body to fill the void in the same way smoke fills a chimney. Leaning back on the wall behind me, I pushed my feet out in front of me onto the opposite wall, and was surprised to find just how...easy it felt! I shuffled my feet to the right and scooched the rest of my body like I was a back-up dancer from Marcia Griffiths’ ‘Electric Boogie’ music video. Whooping and hollering from down below, my friends cheered me on as I wriggled my body out from the safety of the canyon floor and in between the two smooth, airy walls.
Baby steps: one scooch, wiggle, and slide at a time
Suspended thirty feet above the next patch of earth, I felt surprisingly in control of my body and, for once, working with gravity opposed to against it. I loosened the tension in my arms and legs ever so slightly to slide down between the walls, and expanded to slow my movements. Sure, my clothes were slowly getting cheese-grated and the PB&J in my backpack was assuredly being squished to oblivion, but here I was excitedly doing something I had thought impossible - truly, terrifyingly, I-hope-my-mom-isn’t-too-pissed-when-she-finds-out-I-got-stuck-in-a-slot-canyon impossible - a mere sixty seconds ago.
After several minutes of what looked like very awkward, staggered 80’s dance moves, I arrived on solid ground sweaty, dusty, and happy. Grinning and slightly jittery, I looked up from where I had come: no going back now. The only way through the rest of this multi-mile canyon was onward - and downward.
Slot canyon or Georgia O'Keeffe painting
To say that I was familiar with even the concept of canyoneering before embarking on a weekend trip to do just that would be a wild understatement. Honestly, I hadn’t even heard of the...sport? activity? obscure outdoor pursuit? until several weeks earlier when my new roommate Julie gushed about the topic after I commented on a gorgeous, orange-toned photo of a canyon in our living room. Starry-eyed, she tried to describe it as an exponentially more exciting version of going down the slide at the park as a kid - one that spans miles, has slightly higher consequences, and whose floor only sees direct sunlight for about twenty minutes each day, if that. “Oh, and it’s kind of like climbing in that you wear a harness and use ropes, except that...you only go down and not up.” What?! How?! I was immediately intrigued and only half-jokingly begged her to take me canyoneering STAT.
Fortunately, she had an “intro to canyoneering” trip already in the works, so a month later, I piled into a car with old and new friends alike and we set off for what is informally recognized as The Absolute Middle of Nowhere, Utah. On our first full day in the desert, we awoke early to drive down a desolate, sandy road, park at a very nondescript pull-out, and meander through a mile of startlingly flat terrain with nothing but the occasional scrub brush to punctuate the scenery. I was thoroughly unconvinced that there was even a ditch in this wasteland, but not unlike the Looney Tunes road runner very suddenly running out of ground, we came across a pronounced drop-off into a vast canyon seemingly out of nowhere. Leave it to the desert to hide a gaping slot canyon in plain sight!
Rappelling into the canyon was a long process (there were nine of us and one rope), but nothing built my anticipation quite like watching person after person rappel over the lip of the canyon until they were gone, nothing about their presence remaining save an echoey voice from the depths of the sandstone walls.
Brb, going into an endless abyss.
Arriving on the canyon floor with everyone else and beginning the two-mile walk, slide, and shimmy to the end was like nothing I had ever experienced. There is something so intensely raw about being hundreds of feet below the general landscape of an area; to exist in a place that feels so otherworldly and untouched that you have to wonder how many others - if any - have been here before you. To look up and only be able to see a sliver of sky, but look around you and almost feel the warm sandstone hues radiate off the walls, is ethereal and spooky and the-good-kind-of-goosebump inducing all at once.
By the end of the weekend, I felt like I had been led through a literal labyrinth of life lessons: “It’s not only okay to take up space, sometimes it’s the only action that will save you.” “The only way out is through.” “Going down isn’t always easier than going up.” And so on and so forth. The initial experience of canyoneering was akin to discovering as a small child that you have arms and legs that can actually do things, and, above all, it emphasized that we are physically capable of so much more than what our mental musings can evoke. Before embarking on the trip, I knew I was in for some surprises, but it wasn’t until we finally walked out of our last canyon that I realized the excursion was exactly what my life needed at the time. After all, saying yes to adventure will leave you with memories; saying yes to an outright challenge that you don’t know if you can accomplish will leave you with skills you didn’t know you could possess.
Out of the canyon and into a new perspective.
