Fiddle Me This Canyon, Zion National Park, UT

I’ve been working on the 2nd edition Zion book and actually now, after a year of avoidance, making progress. Fiddle Me This is a canyon we discovered in 2013 and it has become one of my favorites. It is different. It is woody and shaded. It runs north so it works well in the heat of the summer, and has a short approach and not-too-long exit. I did write it up on the Canyon Collective as Squiggles, without location information.

At the same time, after two years of work (including considerable time when Nick was down with Lyme disease), CanyoneeringUSA has a new website. I will be releasing a few un-beta’d canyons in the new book, and am releasing them now on the website. So here it is…

Fiddle Me This Canyon

I was looking for good stuff going into Echo Canyon, and this is the good one. I looked seriously at a couple others that were kinda lame. But this one… starts with a 200 foot rappel, has a bunch of raps, a bunch of interesting features and, be still my beating heart, can be done without leaving anything behind. We call this “Ghosting”.

It has three distinct sections, popping out into walking between. Escape to the side is possible at these points. On the first descent in August 2013 with Emma and Casey Wall, after a few days of rain, we did the first two sections and then thought it was over. Jonathan Zambella went there with friends a week later and added the third section, which had signs of passage.

So what is there for anchors? There is not much drainage above, so water does not flush the canyon out much. There are logs and rocks to Fiddle off of. There are some good boulders for a bollard anchor or two. Partner captures of course. We have used a SandTrap in two places. It is a good place for people to learn FiddleSticking (with supervision). About 10 rappels!