Six of our crew headed down to the Roost to do Not Mindbender on Labor Day. We had a good night's sleep and woke up in the morning and went and set up the car spot at the Moki Exit. Then we set out, ready for an adventure. Looking at the map, it looked like we just needed to drop into the first drainage we came to, and so we did. This is where we made our navigation mistake. It had rained just a couple days before and so all of the drainages were more pronounced. We therefore ended up accidentally dropping into the wrong one. We didn't realize this until later, however. There were a couple of short slot sections before we finally got to the main technical section, and it seemed to me that it wasn't as difficult as the description had made it sound. However, we had a blast in there. The canyon had tons of water in it (at least for a Roost canyon) and there were a few swims and we had to rebuild just about every anchor, which we thought was tons of fun. We came to the final rappel faster than I expected and it looked like it was a lot higher than the 90 feet that it was supposed to be. I tossed our 120 foot rope (the longest rope we had) and didn't hear it hit the ground, so I pulled it up and tossed it again. I still didn't hear it hit but figured it had tangled and even if it didn't we couldn't go back, so I started down. I got down about 20 feet and saw that the rope was dangling about 30 feet off the deck. I yelled up at everyone else to warn them. Then I locked off my belay device and had them send down our 50 foot rope, which I tied very securely onto the bottom of our long rope. Then I gave them instructions to lower everyone down on the short rope except for the last person, who we would have pass the knot. I then proceeded down the rope, passed the knot, and landed safely on the ground. After that things went smoothly. We even got to keep our ropes! Mckell came last and she was able to climb into a tree and untie the knot and then climb down the tree. It was about that time that I realized that we were in Mindbender, rather than Not Mindbender, which explained all of the other discrepancies I'd noticed. So, things worked out. We weren't lost and we handled things pretty well in my opinion, and I'll say, not having a long enough rope makes things a little more exciting!
Here's a few pictures. I unfortunately don't have any pictures of Mckell in the tree because my camera battery died.
Rapping into the technical section
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Water!
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The rock was wet and slippery so we decided to do a meat anchored rappel and partner assist the last person here instead of just downclimbing
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Last rappel. This is Dustin being lowered.
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Overall an awesome day out in the Roost! It wasn't too hot and we all had a great time. :cool2:
