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Abseiling off slings? 20-Nov-2006 At 9:08:09 PM JamesMc

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>Wow, points for eco friendly dodginess. I do get a good chuckle at what
>passes for a rap station in some canyons.

Actually I was terrified on that trip. The hemp rope sling thing was fine, abseiling from rotten logs wasn't.

The hard-core canyoners I was with concluded that climbers (me) are gutless. They couldn't understand how someone as scared of falling as me could go out and climb big cliffs. I was wishing I'd taken a bolt drill. It could have stayed at the bottom of my pack, and nobody else need know. That way I could have known that no matter how desperate things got, we could always manage a safe exit.

Looking back, I think we did the right thing. That was around 1990. All the canyoning guide book told us was that the canyons in the area were first explored in the mid 80s. It's likely that we were doing second descents. We saw no trace of the previous visitors except for one tiny thread of synthetic sling in one of four canyons we went down, and hopefully whoever came later saw no trace of our visit.

Last summer I abseiled on something not much better in Refrigerator Canyon, which is a fairly popular "hard" canyon. Pile of rotten logs jambed together, with half a dozen nylon slings around them. Quite a mess actually.

JamesMc