This last weekend, Moydie and I canyoneered a canyon with our friend Steve!! Moydie had been dying to do Birch Hollow down by Zions National Park and so we totally scheduled this trip 3 weeks in advance!!
Birch Hollow is a canyon run with 8-9 repels!! Dang, that's a lot!! The most we had done in a canyon previously was like 3 repels, so this canyon was really great practice!
I love to repel! It's so much fun and I consider myself pretty good at it.
The first repel had me in for a spin, though.
When we got to the first repel, we decided that Steve would go first, me second, and Moydie would come down last. As soon as Steve went down, we heard him shout, "Whoah!! Guys it's a free repel!" A free repel is where you don't have the cliff to put your feet on; you're repelling off an overhang. When I heard that, I started to get nervous. I had never done a free repel before. Moydie comforted me by saying it's really not that different.
After Steve was safely on the ground, it was my turn. I was pretty nervous. Everything was going smoothly until I got to the part where the cliff disappeared. I was going slow and as I came down the overhang, my hand got caught between the overhang lip and the rope! Ouchy whawha!! I yelled to the guys that my hand was caught and they directed me to swing out, so the rope would move off my hand. Now that I had my hand free, I felt more relaxed until I realized one of my braids was stuck into the repel device!! Ugh, my dang long beautiful hair!! I yanked out that braid and kept descending when all of a sudden, the other braid got caught!! Oh my heck, seriously?! I yanked that one out and finally got my two feet off the ground. Not only was this scary, but we had just heard about a girl who had got her hair caught while repelling and with a series of unfortunate events, she ended up in the hospital, almost paralyzed. So yeah, I was freaking out thinking I was going to die. Thankfully, Heavenly Father protected me, but I was upset, frustrated, and scared. I did not want to do any more repels.
I tied my braids back behind my neck and I was not a happy camper when we came to the next repel. It took me 10 minutes to figure out how to do it. Not to mention that there was a group behind us, staring at me. Ugh, if there is anything more frustrating when canyoneering, it's when there are lots of people in the canyon and they are staring at you as you are having a freak out moment. I finally got down that repel, with Moydie coaxing me along.
The third repel was fine. I was still frustrated though with my level of confidence. (I've been having issues with this lately).
When we got to the fourth and longest repel, I was feeling a lot better and thank goodness! This one was huge and awesome!!
This repel was 90 feet! It was so much fun!!
After this one, we had 4 more repels and they were so cool!
After the last repel, we were basically out of the canyon and we were headed back to the car . . . except between us and the car was a canyon we had to ascend now and lots of trees and poky bushes. Yep, that's right, we went bushwacking all the way to the car for about two hours!!!
Here's a video that shows how crazy this was . . .
As weird as it sounds, I loved the bushwacking part!! There is something satisfying about making your own trail through branches and trees that want to eat your hair. Yes, there were times where I got frustrated because of the forever abyss of trees in our way, but it was quite fun!
Here's a pic of our hands after the adventure . . .
Yep, no big deal, we're hard core.
