The Game! The biggest problem for a clean descent is a long rappel through four pothole-ledges near the bottom of the canyon. Jason had slung a dubious flake, which was used on the next descent, too. Scaaary. On his next descent, Jason "backed it up" with this "hook". Even more Scaaaaaaary!!! (Using miscellaneous hardware store hardware for life-safety support is not a good idea. How strong is this S-hook? Impossible to tell - not good to trust your life to this). The problem with hooks, even 'real' hooks, is that they place the force on one little spot. Navajo sandstone does not tend to be very strong, and can just plain explode when loaded in this focused way. Exercise Caution!

Here's the flake into the pothole, showing the exit from the pothole. The shape of the exit is prime territory for using a "sandbag" type anchor.

Here's the sandbags we rapped off of for this series of pothole ledges.

We used three potshots half-filled with sand as an anchor. They were rigged so that when they are rappelled on, the weight is on all three bags, via rapides on their handles with a biner block. The cleaning line pulls from the bottom of the potshots, and the potshots are tied in with several feet of slack between them. In theory, the cleaning line pulls them off one at a time. We could have, and maybe should have, set up a pull cord to remove the rappelling line after we rapped off. As it was, the first bag came off fairly easily, but in every case the second and third bags got tangled together and were hard to pull over the lip.

And it almost worked. One issue is the tendency to make the bags too heavy. We had a big crew, and I was able to remove sand from the bags so that even the big guys in our group barely pulled the bags off the ground. But the issue that got us stuck for an hour and a half was - the shape of the lip. while the first lip was of an ideal shape, we rapped past a pothole/ledge with a sharper lip (a BAD lip) where the bags got stuck. I climbed the rope up there, and re-set the bags, two this time, with very little weight in them (like, 5 lbs each) - and they were still hard to pull down. Then we re-set the bags for the final rappel and got out of there.

Here's what Rob wanted us to rap off of...

And here's Rob, testing it. Bomber!!! (We chose a different option).

After No Kidding, I went off scouting another canyon called Just Kidding. Here's some of the nice slickrock hiking I found. Hmmmm, a few dark clouds.

And a nice little slot, over there.