Water Canyon
Last Candition: October 22, 2011
bone dry, anchor in fairly good conditions ,first drop is clean so use a fiddle stick or clean on your way out. 2rap nice deadmand lot of material to build anchors 3 rap nice deadman, 4 rap out of the blots,webbing overkilled (lot of it) one bolt a spinner pothole dry not that easy to stem across if going in is a bit of work going out but doable with assisting. last part of the canyon no anchor for the optional ascending and last drop on water canyon out of a very small tree and very small not human rated rapide but canyon really nice not very tight for a man 6ft 185lbs
Beta led us to skip the first rap - suggesting that there may be nothing to make an anchor for the second rap. If you skip these raps, continue on the left rim of the canyon. At the first opportunity to drop in, look for an anchor about 30' down from the trail on a small shrub. This allows a 30' rap to an easily downclimbable section to the canyon floor. The climbers in our group were able to find a scramble to the bottom, but I wasn't comfortable doing so. Once at the bottom, we walked back to look at the second rap; it's not downclimbable but would be enjoyable given enough anchor material.
Lots of fun downclimbs. A few simple raps nothing too challenging. I really enjoyed this canyon and recommend it.
wrong water canyon :)
All water is avoidable/non existent. Anchors are good for now. Only mud is THIGH deep, right before the last rap, is avoidable with some strenuous stemming. Semi-keeper has two bolts, stemmed by our tallest member, assisted others across. With shuttle, 6 hours.
Overall: Muddy! Avoidable and un-avoidable water. Mostly acceptable anchors, but we replaced webbing at first rap as well as the chockstone just before semi-keeper rap.
Dropped into canyon from first rappel, then jugged back out to avoid 2nd/3rd rappels due to nasty mud-pit at top of 3rd rap and less-than-inspiring deadman in place. Semi-keeper holding a lot of water (maybe 4-5 ft. depth?); we avoided entry by traversing over it, though mud on the shoes made this quite challenging. Water in narrows below semi-keeper. Second-to-last rap (from 25-ish ft. slings on tree) would deposit one in pool of unknown depth; can't comment on last rap since we exited via prow of E/SE fork junction due to time constraints. Very enjoyable canyon, in spite of the mud.
Upper Water Canyon is dry but there is wading in the lower part of the canyon past the confluence. Not sure how deep because we decided to turn around at that point.