Black Hole Conditions - warning?

Did the Black Hole of White Canyon on Wednesday. According to the triplogs and information I had obtained, the log jams and debris had all been cleared out. As of Wednesday the debris has returned to the last 40 yards of the Black Hole part of the canyon. It is chock full of floating logs and branches and requires a great deal of physical exertion to get past this point. The last 10 feet seem impossible, with an exit used by crawling up a muck/debris pile and boulder, jumping over to other boulders over the top of the mess, and sliding down into the water past the jam up.

This was my first time in the canyon, I'm not sure if this is the normal shape of the canyon, so if it is always like this, someone can correct me.

It looks similar to the warnings on Tom's site of what you may encounter:
http://canyoneeringusa.com/utah/intro/end18.jpg
but without the standing opportunities of the man in the right of the photo.

any chance you took photos?

No photos, sorry.

A few years back when I did it with a bunch of bogleyites it was easy; just swimming in cold water. Musta had some good flashfloods come thru and slow down at the hole.

The log soup was not there this summer.... sounds like the recent storms have added debris.

I've been doing the Black Hole for enough years now to know that the log soup is a cyclic event.

You pay your money and take your chances. :crazy:

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Originally Posted by Iceaxe

The log soup was not there this summer.... sounds like the recent storms have added debris.

I've been doing the Black Hole for enough years now to know that the log soup is a cyclic event.

You pay your money and take your chances. :crazy:

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There was some amazingly disgusting log soup at the beginning in June when Gavin and I did it. However, that was avoidable, but like most things in canyons, I'd agree with Shane that it's probably cyclical.

it jammed up with logs during the monsoons last summer too, then cleared back out by late fall/freezefest. be interesting to see how bad the jam is, and if it clears this fall. log jams definitely up the ante for freezefest.

Thanks for the info. Hopefully it will clear up before Freezefest. But until then I guess people are warned. I'm pretty sure it is not avoidable - it seems to start just past where the ropes are hanging down from (what I'm assuming was) the 2004 log jam event, given how high up those ropes go.

The changes are cyclical, for sure, yet they seem to be more frequent nowadays. I first hiked the BH in '94 and for ten years there was hardly any change from year to year. I realize that's not much of a time span to compare changes in a canyon that's existed - for the most part - in its current state for thousands of years. It is interesting, though, to observe just how much more active the BH has been the past five years or so. Perhaps this cycle of changes is cyclical, too!

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Originally Posted by moabmatt

The changes are cyclical, for sure, yet they seem to be more frequent nowadays. I first hiked the BH in '94 and for ten years there was hardly any change from year to year. I realize that's not much of a time span to compare changes in a canyon that's existed - for the most part - in its current state for thousands of years. It is interesting, though, to observe just how much more active the BH has been the past five years or so. Perhaps this cycle of changes is cyclical, too!

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In Zion at least, I have seen more changes after the winter of 2010-2011 than in the total of 10 years of canyoneering here. HUGE rain in December 2010, then a winter with plenty of snow...

So, yes, I think we are seeing more changes this last year and the year before, than in the previous ten years. A period of greater change.

Tom

I blame global warming.... :haha:

With the amount of water and debris that flows down White Canyon when it flashes I'm amazed the changes are as small as they are. That sucker really roars a couple times each year.

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I was part of a group of 5 that did BH on 9-24 & we definitely found the section of log soup. In comparison to what I saw in Imlay just below the crossroads 9-17, there was more small matter, bark and twigs and general dreck in the BH, whereas the Imlay soup had a lot of larger logs. In any case, while working through it was no fun & didn't smell too great, and climbing up, out, over/around the boulder at the lower end wasn't easy, it didn't seem too terrible. The logs were certainly not stacked up into multi-foot vertical piles of unstable debris which required climbing over rappelling/handlining down off of or any of that sort of headache that I seem to remember reading stories of from years ago. It simply required the annoying and tiresome effort of slowly working your way through the stuff while swimming. No fun but not life threatening, at least not for our group which included 3 novices in their first log soup experience. Still well worth being aware of though!

Wayne