Black Water, Deep Canyon

Mike and I escape over the mountains at midnight. In a blizzard, fittingly. Flakes as fat as miniature parachutes swoop into the windshield, tires hiss. Headlights scout through the trees as a radio preacher tonguelashes us.

Anyone else would have called it off. Not us. When it looks bad, when a storm is blowing in and everyone is advised to stay home, watch TV, look at the world through their living room window, that's when we toss the climbing gear into the truck and head out into the bellowing.

Usually we strike out for the mountains. Mountaineering is what we know. The Rockies, the Andes, the Himalayas, Tanzania to Tibet. We know how to climb. That's why we're not doing it this time. There's no adventure in doing what you know. We figured that it was time we went canyoneering.

You've never heard of it? No surprise. Canyoneering is a strange, little-known sport practiced by a handful of spartan disciples living near the deserts of the Southwest. That's where the canyons are, from the middle of Utah south to the middle of Arizona: Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon, Grand Gulch; and thousands more that are less known: Black Dragon Wash, Old Woman Wash, Dirty Devil, Escalante. This is the Colorado Plateau, the most paradoxical geography in the U.S.--bone-dry desert designed by water. Earth cut to the bone.

Generally, all the canyons were formed the same way: Crooked knives of water slowly sliced down through a layer cake of sedimentary rock. Took millions of years. There are three types of canyons: V-shaped, which form in uniformly soft rock; stair-stepped, which form in alternating layers of hard and soft rock (the Grand Canyon is a fine example); and slot canyons, which cut straight down through uniformly hard rock. Slot canyons are the favorite of canyoneers.

Slots are fissures sometimes 300 feet deep but no wider than a man's shoulders; curving, smooth-walled incisions so unfathomable the sun never touches the stygian streams at their bottoms. Inside a slot, stone walls connect hidden chambers, deep vaults and subterranean passageways.

To canyoneer is to explore one of these incisions. To slip, drop, wriggle, crawl, scrape, climb, float and choke through a crack in the Iithosphere. To fight up through the waterfalls. To swim through dungeons. In a way, canyoneering is the inverse of mountaineering--instead of going up, you go down. But whenever you go down you have to come back up, and vice versa, so they're closer than you would think. And the skills required are similar: technical rock climbing, rappelling, route finding.

"To be a good canyoneer," one veteran curmudgeon told us, "you have to be able to climb sheer walls like a lizard, squeeze through holes like a rat and swim in freezing-cold water as natural as a trout. Can't be afraid of heights or afraid of the dark or afraid of tight spots. Big balls come in handy, long as they don't get you stuck somewhere."

He thought he was scaring us away. Instead, we thought we'd better try it before MTV put it on the tube for all those people who hide inside during a storm.

•

We follow the path of the water. Out of Wyoming into Colorado, slanting toward Utah, wipers shoveling sleet. The mountain snow melts and flows into rivers that crash down green mountains. Eventually it will cut across the desert, where it continues to carve the canyons we'll soon explore.

We get gas and candy in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Switch drivers. 1-70 West. Mike shoves his red head out the window and howls.

Green River, Utah. Gliding down Main Street at four A.M. Neon lights dripping and buzzing. Preacher has given up and gone to bed. Gas for the truck, candy bars for us, switching drivers again. West 14 miles then south, straight into the desert. The stars begin to shut down. Black sandstone turns to indigo. Clumps of sagebrush become turtles or panthers or trolls, anything you want.

Before us, below wet silver clouds, lies a ribbon of asphalt perfectly level, perfectly straight, perfectly empty. I flatten the pedal. We float over Glen Canyon, magically suspended above the deep drop. The bridge is a tightrope hung in the sky like a Magritte painting.

Just as the sun ruptures the horizon, we pull off the asphalt into wet red mud. Cut the engine, push open the doors. Not a sound. Then a bird. A meadowlark.

You ever need to make it to another world, just drive all night.

We step out, pop our necks, peer over the landscape. We know there's a gorge right in front of us, right off the bumper, but we can't see it. All we can see is a wet desert. Mesas the shape of crushed cowboy hats. Scrub junipers with snow in their hair. Clouds pressing down like metal clamps. It all looks level and calm and safe. But it's a fabulous lie.

I move forward and the chasm opens below my feet. It's like being on the roof of a building and walking to the edge.

Everything is perspective. On the ground the Colorado Plateau appears benign. One continuous piece. Just pick a point and walk to it. Fact is, the whole place is so deeply dissected it's untraversable. You can see it from a plane or a topo map. Canyons of all sizes, like serpents, have eaten out the land. Some are half a mile wide and 50 miles long with a vast oxbow that could circle an entire city. Others are deep, short troughs with sudden, inexplicable doglegs. Still others are loopy rents as thin as string.

We sit on a stained rock and change from jeans and T-shirts into plastic: polypropylene long underwear, polyester shirts and pants, fleece jackets and caps. Canyoneering can be a cold, wet business, so cotton can kill you. Cotton keeps water against your skin, sucking away heat.

Off with the sandals, on with the boots. You would think sport sandals would be ideal for walking in a stream, but you're wrong. Boots, solid leather hikers, are the answer. Canyoneering is not simply walking a streambed; it's scrambling and clambering between walls of stone. Even tough toes would be shredded in sandals.

We spread out our map on the tailgate. White Canyon is the invisible gorge before us. We want to explore one of its remote side canyons. We also want to travel upstream rather than down; climbing is always more interesting than rappelling. We choose a narrow slot perhaps 12 miles long that on the topo looks like a lightning bolt. It enters White Canyon from the opposite side of the rim we're standing on. We have an obscure guidebook called Canyoneering 2: Technical Loop Hikes in Southern Utah. It was written by a guy named Steve Allen, an intrepid, articulate fellow with no address and no phone number.

"Man's unreachable," said his publisher. "He's a genuine desert rat. Disappears into those canyons and doesn't come out for months."

Our canyon is the most difficult, thus the most dangerous, in his book. We sort gear as I read out loud.

"This is a technical route that should be attempted only by experienced canyoneers."

Mike grins. We've done a lot of stuff together, but the only canyons we've done have been by accident.

Besides, guidebook writers have to write like that. They don't and they get their asses in a sling when some tenderfoot gets bumped. Case in point: In 1993, five teenagers and three adults try canyoneering in Zion National Park. Hard rain, strong water, two adults drown immediately. Swept over falls. The six left alive spend five days on a ledge before being rescued. They file a $24.5 million lawsuit against Zion National Park and the Washington County Water Conservation District.

"The leader must be familiar with belay techniques and capable of leading the climbing sections without protection. There are several places with lots of exposure."

"Yes!" Mike snaps his fingers like a belly dancer. We divvy up gear. Tent and bags, stove and fuel, food for days, dry suits and the climbing equipment: two #165 climbing ropes, harnesses, slings, hardware we can insert into the rock to anchor the ropes to get ourselves out of whatever we manage to get into. We cram it all into airtight, waterproof dry bags, then pound the bags into our packs. Our packs will float, even if we don't.

"There is a lot of wading and swimming on this trip, so air temperatures should be reasonably warm. There is the potential for flash floods."

"Huh," Mike says. "Don't go when it's cold and don't go when it's raining. Now how you gonna have any fun?"

•

A hidden cleft in the canyon wall. Red water, blood of the earth, pours from the portal. This is the mouth of our canyon.

We found a way down into White Canyon without rappelling. Then we hiked the streambed until this opening in the right-hand wall appeared.

We splash into the water and immediately pass through the ancient hatchway into a tunnel of stone. The cold cuts through our boots and burns our toes.

"This is a secret passage," Mike whispers.

We are drawn inside. Swallowed. We (continued on page 136)Deep Canyon(continued from page 80) splash forward until the darkness lessens and the sides begin to spread back. Suddenly they open wide, like massive stone doors, and we step into a primeval cathedral.

Baroque walls soar upward for 300 feet, reach out for each other far above our heads, then halt in mid-arc. It is a sanctuary left open to heaven. Only a small piece of sky is visible. There are tiny porticoes and hanging pulpits and ornate balconies. Split apses. A dissolving loggia. A choir of birds sweeping from one loft to the next.

The magnificence of the architecture stills us. We walk knee-deep in the stream. We crane our heads back on our shoulders. Our feet stumble over underwater boulders as if they were sacred hymnals and diluvial texts.

We pass through the nave. Through the chancel. Then the sidewalls drop in close again and we exit the cathedral.

"Jesus!"

"Yup," says Mike.

Not far beyond the cathedral, as if connected by an underground hallway, lies a maze of elliptical chambers.

"Catacombs," cries Mike. He squints at me over his shoulder. I know what he's thinking. Back to Palermo, Sicily. We were 18. We illegally explored the cavern beneath an old church. It was honeycombed with crypts like these--but in Sicily each chamber held a body.

•

At the end of a wide corridor with overhanging walls is a short headwall. It is our first obstacle.

The streambeds of slot canyons are not flat. Instead, they drop over a series of benches, or steps. The run, the distance from one step to the next, can vary from several hundred yards to several miles. The rise, the height of a step, can vary from ten to 100 feet. Each step is sliced up the middle with a single incision caused by a ribbon of water running over the step and slowly cutting backward into the rock. Thus, inside deep slot canyons there are even deeper slits. Imagine a hallway out of Alice in Wonderland, long and crooked with tall walls and no ceiling. The floor has sloping flat stretches separated by steps of all sizes. Now imagine that the Mad Hatter has used a chain saw to cleave each step.

Ascending and descending the headwalls inside a slot, either through the slit or on the face, is one of the biggest challenges of canyoneering.

As we near the step we begin to hear it: a low rumbling that pours from the slit and rebounds down the passage.

We enter the slit and wade into a glassy pool. The noise is tremendous. The sidewalls fit together overhead like a puzzle. The water rises to our thighs, then recedes as we gain a hidden sandbar. The pounding grows. We wade across another pool inside another cavern, slide around a wedge of stone, step inside.

We have entered an hourglass: the glass shell turned to sandstone, the sand to liquid. Water is time and stone is history. To canyoneer is to go back in time, back in history.

Falls roar down from a hole overhead in the top of the hourglass. The pool is forever exploding. The walls of the chamber are unclimbable.

"Impossible!" I yell.

Mike smirks.

We back out of the antechambers until we exit the slit. Mike points to a ramp that appears to ascend the step on the left-hand side. We scramble up it easily, gaining the next level in the canyon.

Onward.

Already we have fallen into our old rhythm. Trading leads. Moving fast. Moving single file. Moving in unison. Our strides match and we have the same pace. This is essential. In the wilderness, if you can't move together, you can't be together.

•

It begins to rain. Not hard. Just rain dropping down between the walls. Mike leans his head back and catches the fluttering drops in his mouth.

"Never go when it's raining, never go when it's cold." He's using that radio preacher's voice.

Up the canyon we go. We can't see far ahead. The bed of the stream curves and walls shut off the view like immense curtains. This creates a constant state of unknown--a thirst, a lust. When you can't see where you're going, every step becomes an adventure.

The canyon gradually begins to squeeze in. Another headwall appears. Again we pass into the iris. It is tighter than before. If we spread our arms we can touch both sides. Just a crack of sky above. The walls are closer so the water is deeper. When it leaps up and bites our nuts, we back off into a side cove and haul our dry suits out of our packs.

We brought them just for this. In summer you might not need a dry suit for canyoneering, but in spring you could die from hypothermia without one.

Dry suits are frog skins. They have rubber gaskets at the ankles, wrists and neck designed to keep cold water out and warm air in. They are warmer than wet suits--wet suits allow water in, next to your skin, which is then warmed by your body. For canyoneering, the best dry suits are those made with tough synthetic shells--you're likely to be dragging yourself across rocks.

Hypothermia is a deadly drop in body core temperature. First you start to shiver uncontrollably. Muscles become stiff. Your hands and feet become painful, then you lose the use of them. Your speech begins to slur and your heartbeat slows. Your mind gets stupid. You become uncoordinated and begin to stumble. If your core temperature (98.6°F) drops eight degrees, you'll no longer be able to walk--another eight degrees and you're dead. Submerged in extremely cold water without a wet suit or a dry suit, you can die in a matter of minutes.

We zip each other inside our dry suits and wade back into the current, floating our packs ahead of us. We pass between two smooth lips of stone and enter a vaulted slit so narrow our shoulders touch either wall. Water runs between our legs. The walls are sinuous and slippery. With each step the orifice enfolds us, closing over and behind us.

We glide deeper. The water rises. Above the thighs. Above the crotch. Above the waist. I sink to my chest and begin to swim.

I am swimming in the fluid of earth in a fold of stone. The walls bend and curve so wildly above me that the sky is gone. I am inside the flesh of stone.

I swim through one chamber, into the next, into the next, into the last: a womb. A waterfall spills down above me from a hole in the ceiling. I can make out just a sliver of sky. I leave my pack and move forward, into the cascade.

You cannot canyoneer if you cannot climb. You must have balance, and agility and strength. You must also believe that nothing is insurmountable.

Right arm and right leg against one wall, left arm and left leg against the other. It is a classic canyoneering position. I lift myself out of the water and climb straight up the waterfall, pushing against the skin of the chamber. Twenty feet above the pool I pass through the hole and exit into the next level of the canyon, stunned and jubilant.

I stand on the edge and look over the waterfall, down into the hole. Mike is grinning up at me, his red hair plastered across his face.

We can't get the packs up through the falls, so Mike floats them back down the channel. I walk above until we find a spot where we can shuttle them up. Mike turns around and swims back. At the waterfall he howls with delight, then skillfully chimneys up.

"Jesus Ann, that was great!" He is trembling. "If only the whole canyon could be like that. It was, was--"

"Primal."

•

We leave the dry suits on. Raining steady now, occasional waves of sleet.

We eat lunch, our hands stiff from the cold. Candy and smashed bananas. No three-buck energy bars. They're a con. They won't make you a better athlete. Mike likes M&M's. I like Butterfingers.

We shoulder our packs and move on.

Always the walls rise above us. We pass between black-streaked cliffs and hoodoo galleries. Through ventricles and veins. Through lost gardens with downy cottonwoods and rock-cupped purple flowers. Over sand--black, red, white, green, blue. Over stone that is scalloped as sharp as waves or as smooth as a cat's back.

Late in the afternoon we reach another bisected headwall. The water beyond is running harder and deeper now. It has changed color. Deeper brown, almost black. An ominous sign. The canyon is flooding. Still, into the aperture. The walls sandwich us, the water becomes deep and again we must swim. It is a dark channel with dark, wet walls pushing in against our shoulders.

My pack becomes wedged in a cave behind an eddy, and I try to pull it loose. Suddenly I'm shouting. But nothing will come out. My whole body tenses. The shock is so great it cuts away my breath.

"What's wrong?"

"Zipper burst!"

My dry suit is filling with icy water. I abandon my pack and begin to slam myself forward, my arms whirling in short choppy strokes, my legs frog-kicking violently. In seconds I weigh 300 pounds.

I can feel the temperature of my body plunging. I know what is happening but I cannot climb the walls around me. All I can do is swim. Swim.

My movements become jerky, like a puppet's. My hands and feet turn to wood. I must get out of the water.

My mouth begins to seal. My jaws lock. I must get out of the water.

At a small narrowing where the channel bends, I pull myself out of the current, wedging my body between the gelid walls. A hundred pounds of water spills out of my dry suit. I can do nothing about the legs. They are ballooned full of water. I move upward by suspending myself in the vault in a jumping-jack position. Left hand and left foot against left wall, right hand and right foot against right wall. One limb at a time. One hand, one foot, one hand, one foot. My fingers and toes cannot feel the stone.

Slowly I ascend. I reach the top of the slit shivering badly.

Once again we pulley up the packs. Then Mike swims the channel gracefully and ascends the waterfall effortlessly. I am waiting for him above the throat of stone, trying to control my shivering.

"You all right?"

I nod.

"Your lips are blue. Sure you're all right?"

I nod again. If I try to speak he will hear my teeth rattle.

Looking back, after it is all over and you have survived, you can recognize the point at which you should have turned around. Problem is, that is precisely the point at which the real adventure begins.

•

We have to do the whole canyon to get out. We know we are close. We quicken our pace. Become efficient. Focused. We pass swiftly through corridor after corridor, jogging on the rock beside the river. We leap between boulders and negotiate steep slabs without thinking.

Another headwall.

Another narrow cavity.

Climb up through one waterfall, up a spiral chute and into a small shaft.

"Shit!"

We are at the bottom of a well. The walls are slick with moss. The well is filling with dark water.

"Dead end! Back. Back!"

We are making decisions instantly. Operating on automatic. On experience. On instinct.

We climb back down to the first waterfall and traverse sideways onto a ledge that rises up the right-hand wall. We can see the rim of the canyon. We are almost out. Only 30 feet.

Mike uncoils the ropes. I tie in and begin moving up the cliff, but the walls are too soft and slippery. All the rain has turned the rock to mud. I try kicking the toes of my boots into the face, but they drip back out. Every handhold I grab comes away in my palm. I cannot keep my balance.

"Mike, this won't go!"

"We have to turn back. Find another way out."

I downclimb while he sets up a rappel. It is twilight. We rap back into the inner gorge where we had been just minutes before. It is a 50-foot drop straight into black water.

Coil the rope. Sling it over a shoulder. Go. Move. Downstream. Down canyon. As fast as we can.

The water is growing deeper by the minute. The canyon is flooding. I discover a side canyon with a waterfall and climb halfway up. "We'll need the ropes."

"We don't have time!" Mike says.

The rain is pouring. We are running. Farther back down the canyon we search for a plausible exit.

From a short straightaway we think we see a weakness in the canyon wall. A climbable gash. When we reach the base of the cliff we don't stop to rope up. We start climbing.

Water is running off the walls everywhere. In the gloaming it looks as if all the water in the world is flooding into the canyon. The great deluge. The preacher was right.

We are scaling a steep gully, hand over hand. Liquid streams down over rocks and plants and roots, into our sleeves and our mouths and down our necks. We yank ourselves up through the mud and can't see a thing and can't stop and can't think of anything but ascend, ascend, ascend.

I choose the wrong line. I am stuck halfway up the wall. The canyon rim is a hundred feet above me, the raging brown river as many feet below. I must turn around. I carefully climb back down to the ledge Mike is standing on.

Now we are climbing side by side. In the rain, up the wall, sweating and freezing. We use the same holds. Stand on the same blocks. Up through an ugly chimney, straight on through a tree burned by lightning, out over a broken overhang. We are rising out of the canyon. Suddenly we know we will get out.

Twenty feet from the top we are rimrocked, stymied by a smooth band of featureless stone. It is pitch-dark now. Mike is below me, clinging to the wall. The canyon yawns under my heels. Two hundred feet of empty space.

I skin off my pack and throw the rope over my shoulder. It is impossible to climb straight up. I move sideways. My feet tiptoe along one ledge, my hands fiercely grip another.

I am still sliding sideways, sticking to the pouring wall. It is as if I had climbed over a balcony on the 20th floor. I find a wide vertical crack, put both hands inside and pull myself up. The handholds are slick. I have to regrip every few seconds. I twist the toes of my boots into the seam. I think they are solid, but when I put weight on them, they pop out. My body swings out above the abyss.

I understand. It is simple. I am 200 feet in the air in the dark in a rainstorm, fastened to the canyon wall only by the strength of my fingers. I can even see myself. As if my eyes were inside a small bird arcing through the rain above the roaring canyon, watching me, knowing I can't fly.

I get my feet to stick. Rest. Close my eyes. Control my heart.

I reach for a knob on the edge and it breaks away. I find another. It holds. My feet hold.

Carefully, ever so carefully, I pull up. Suddenly I pull over the top. I am out of the gorge.

The rain has turned to snow. I tie the rope to the trunk of a juniper. The arms of the juniper reach out over the rim, into space, catching snowflakes like falling stars.

I drop down the rope. Mike ties on my pack and then his, and I haul them both up. I throw the rope back down and Mike ties in.

Then we are both on top, standing in the blackness on the lip of the abyss, escaped. Escaped from our upside-down mountain.

•

It takes another two days to get out of cavern country. Plugging through gumbo. Using muddy ropes to scale seeping mesas. Rappelling into unknown canyons. Fording swollen streams.

Ahhh, the truck. Never so welcome a sight. Turn the heat on full blast. Turn the radio on full blast.

Midnight on the highway north of Hanksville. The engine hums to itself like an old man. No need to drive fast.

"We could go all night."

Mike's eyes are closed.

"Do like we used to do. Throw the bags out alongside the road."

We both crack up.

We find a strip motel back in Green River. Flat roof, blinking neon sign. All the doors painted bright turquoise.

Showers so hot that steam curls along the ceiling. Each in our own big, swaybacked bed, sinking into the canyon of sleep watching an old Western about the adventures of two cowboys.

Mike uncoils the ropes. I tie in and begin moving up the cliff, but all the rain has turned the rock to mud.