--guest rave from Keith Langenwalter

OK, gear is finally put away (after drying, rinsing, drying again, then letting it sit in my living room for a week), new shoes have been ordered (RIP Orange SAR 5.10 C2s!), receipts have been entered into Splitwise, and I'm about as caught up from the trip as I'll be (which is to say, not at all).

Biggest takeaways from the trip:
a) The leader should NOT carry the 300 foot rope.
b) Don’t delay- treat the entire day as urgent.
c) Get more experience with efficiency with problem solving and potholes before going back to Heaps.
d) Definitely get Tom Jones to invite himself along on your trip down Diana’s Throne the day before- I had no intention of having him spend the whole time showing us tricks, but that’s what he graciously did.

Yeah, that was one hell of a canyon. I think my biggest shortcoming was not being direct enough as the leader to push through some of the problem solving faster, but this is also where lack of experience with canyons of this caliber comes in. This group and I have done dozens of canyons together, but the only canyons that actually prepped us for this were Imlay Sneak (which was great, but also took us a long time, 15 hours), Full Left Fork (with the single keeper just before Das Boot, both times it wasn’t a big deal), Middle Echo (again, the pothole wasn’t too much of a problem), and then Family Camp a year ago, where all the potholes were dry so we just partner-assisted out of a few of them. OK, others helped (Englestead for the 300 foot rap, Das Boot for getting over obstacles, and none of the other canyons has hurt).

I’ve always been the leader, and aside from some trips with Kevin Clark up here in the PNW, it’s all been us figuring it out on our own. I’ve been in Portland Mountain Rescue for 19 years now, so ropework isn’t a problem, but SAR is different from canyoneering. I can do things (relatively) safely, but not necessarily as fast as they need to get done.

Heaps threw far more obstacles at us, and while we were able to get through them, they all took time. Combine that with two leaky drysuits, and one of my guys getting exhausted part-way through the third narrows, and we had to move even slower to make sure that we could find the best way through every obstacle for the guy who was hurting.

I thought we were doing well on the approach (and by our traveling speed, we certainly seemed to be!). We left the West Rim Trailhead at 4:30 am, which was a bit ahead of schedule (though in hindsight we should have started sooner), and reached camp 4 at 8:00 am, but that probably should have been 3 hours, not 3.5. It took a little over 30 minutes to get to the first rap and gear up (well, gear up a bit before the first rap), and we had all 5 of us walking on the wide-open slickrock below rap 2 at 10:00 am. We reached the start of the first narrows at 10:30, but then spent an hour getting suits on, which was probably way longer than it should have been.

I felt like we cruised through the first narrows UNTIL we reached that pothole. I sent someone else down first, and he tried my hooking kit first, then we tried using a rope bag as a pack toss, both of which ALMOST worked multiple times. My buddy in the pothole was staying on the rap rope, so no one else could come down from the top of the prior rap. I think this is where I fell short as a leader- I didn’t insist he get off so someone else with a smaller pack could get down and throw it across, which is what eventually got us out of the pothole. 1:30 pm and we were out of the first narrows, with more than an hour of that dealing with the last pothole.

We cruised through the second narrows in under an hour, reaching the crossroads at 2:30. I thought we were doing OK based on timings I saw from other people about the third narrows taking about twice as long as the second, so I was padding the time and thinking it would take us three hours. Oh boy was I wrong.

(Editor’s note: I’ve always considered there to be two narrows sections: the Phantom Valley Narrows and the Terminal Narrows. With the Terminal N taking almost twice as long as the PV Narrows.)

I still don’t know where all the time was eaten up, but that third narrows, holy crap. It was both incredibly awesome and just unrelenting. We entered at 3:30 (having taken a 30 minute break at the crossroads, then 30 minutes to get to the start of the third narrows), we reached the Iron room at 5:15, then the dead deer at 6:40. I have no idea how it took that long between all those landmarks, but all the problems just added up. I did use a human anchor for what I think was the drop I was asking about (rap 18, before the Iron Room), then slid down myself. It would have been a lot faster to have the first person rap off me, verify the pool was safe, then have everyone else slide, but with the guy who was exhausted, we were playing it safe, which also meant slower. Also, I will say I was happy to see the dead deer, as it meant we were getting close to the end!

However, around the alcove, the guy who’d been with me up the front (one of the guys with a leaky drysuit), who’d pretty much been doing a lot of the problem solving, hit an absolute wall, sat down, and insisted on eating. Oh boy, now that’s two people down. I went ahead, but had to wait for everyone to catch up to get through the next section, and we didn’t reach the exit sequence until after 8:00 pm (my photo from when I got there at 8:25 shows one of my friends most of the way up the dihedral trailing a rope), so over 5 hours from the crossroads. The two with leaky drysuits were hypothermic (the guy who bonked at the alcove was moderately so, shaking pretty severely), so we had to wait for a while just letting them warm back up. Thankfully once they got the drysuits and wet clothes off, that happened fairly quickly, but sunset was at 8:47 (note the past tense). I was actually gearing up to start down, as some people said their extra clothes were wet, but the guy who was exhausted was also having grip issues. No way I’m having someone do 500 feet of rappelling on skinny ropes in the dark without being able to grip a rope. So we resigned to spend the night.

It was actually way more pleasant than I was expecting. I always carry gear for this situation (and some extra because I’m always the leader), and because it’s the desert, people’s wet layers dried surprising quickly. According to my Whoop, I got really good sleep that night, but tragedy struck when I was putting on my beloved C2 boots (you know, the kind that have been discontinued for years?) and one of the straps snapped off.

We were moving before 6:30 am, as we weren’t in a huge rush to get out of there, that’s still a pretty cool spot. I think we started the exit raps at 7:40 am (again, where the hell did the time go? It shouldn’t have taken that long!) I was starting the second rap before 8:00 am, the first person was on the ground at Emerald Pools at 8:40, and last person (me) touched down at Emerald Pools at 9:30 am.

We made it back to Springdale at 11:00 (with a 10:00 am check-out at the Airbnb…. oops), and managed to get a super late checkout of 3:00 pm, so we got the other car from the upper trailhead on our way back. After packing up the house, we went out for a steak dinner/breakfast/lunch (as it was all of those meals combined!), then back to Vegas for our flight.

One last thing -- up until this trip, I've had two unplanned bivies in my outdoor career, exactly one week from each other. First was on the West Ridge of Forbidden late June 2003, and the second (a week later) was the top of the NE Face of Mt Redoubt (both mountains in the North Cascades). I managed to avoid another one for almost 20 years...