September 24 and 25 The Squeeze and Quandary Direct
In the movie Lawrence of Arabia, an Arab boy quickly sinks into an apparently dry morass of desert sand. We see the effects of his head just disappearing under the sand. Shortly into the technical section of the Squeeze, I was sinking into a pothole of quicksand. I tried pulling my left foot out, sinking to my right knee. I shifted to my weight back onto my left foot and now both legs were knee deep into the wet mud. I shifted my weight one more time and now I was in over my knees. I didn’t seriously think I was headed under the mud but I knew I had to do something different. It was at about this point we were joined in the Canyon by David Wallace and his group (David blogs on Tales from Narrow Places). I yelled out that I was in quicksand. Immediately, his friend Eric bogged down just like I was. David literally ran across the mud without sinking making it on to terra firma.
We drove in from Los Angeles on Friday September 23. We stopped in Monroe, Utah, just south of Richmond, at the Sage Brush Grill for dinner. Just before getting there, for a buck we picked up firewood by the side of someone’s drive way. We dined on country fried steak. It was perfect, with mash potatoes and gravy, and served with a vegetable. The breading on the steak was caramelized dark brown to a crunchy consistency. After dinner, we got back on the road and followed the super highway 70 to the Sinbad interchange. Driving this amazing road with its fantastic rest stops, one could not avoid concluding that Utah senators had really delivered for the State of Utah. We made our way down to the Airstrip at Hidden Splendor Mine in the dark. There were hordes of people camped along the airstrip and around it. This was the weekend of the SUWA retreat. We were thinking of finding Tom Jones and introducing ourselves, but this was a zoo. There had to be at least 200 people there. We turned around, drove up the road about a half-mile, and parked at a slight wide spot on the road. We slept on a nasty little patch of land.
Our plan for Saturday, September 24 was to do the middle and lower squeeze using the Miner’s claim short cut. We were up early, and drove to what folks were calling the Ghetto, a turn out near the end of the airstrip where the die-hard partiers there for the SUWA roundup were camped out. We parked, shouldered our packs, and we were off at 7:30 AM. From the building structure along the Muddy, it was 15 minutes of hiking up the Muddy before reaching the weakness in the cliff bands that switched back up the Miners Claim short cut. The way up is marked by cairns. It was 2.5 hours of hiking before we found our way to the start of the middle squeeze. The middle squeeze was relatively non-technical, narrow, and fun. We are not certain where we transitioned from the middle squeeze to the lower squeeze. However, soon I dropped into a pothole off a hand line to immediately find myself stuck. My partner, Jasper, helped me back out and threw a perfectly placed sand filled potshot onto the other side of the lip that wedged into a narrowing groove. This allowed us to defeat this particular pothole. I felt this was surely the start of the lower squeeze. My partner disagreed. It really didn’t matter.
What was clear was that we were soon into the lower squeeze. We had lunch and shortly after this we ran into David Wallace and his three partners including Mark and Eric. It was immediately obvious that these boys had style to their canyoneering. They enticed us to jump into a couple of potholes. I can’t say I was happy about that. However, for the most part the canyon was bolted so descending into the potholes was either by down climbing or rappelling. In fact there was so much water that we used very few of the bolt as it was for the most part easy to lower ourselves into the very full potholes. The potholes were filled with varying amounts of water so every pothole exit posed its own challenges. Soon, David and his group raced beyond us so we were left to work our way through pothole school on our own and listen to their shouts as they probably jumped into yet another pothole. The weather was glorious. I wore a 3/2 wetsuit and to be quite honest I was a bit cold. Jasper had 5/3 wetsuit and was toasty. The Squeeze is long. I kept hopping we would get into the sun to warm up but it stayed just out of reach. Finally, we made the last set of rappels at about 5:30PM and joined David’s party relaxing along the Muddy. We got out of the wetsuits and headed back to the airstrip.
Of course at this point we still needed a campsite. We drove back up the road and set up camp at the junction of the road that leads up to the start of the Quandary. I brought with me a 6-liter stainless steel pressure cooker. In my ice chest, I had a 1.7 pound neatly tied chuck roast. I rubbed it with chrushed, fresh garlic, sea salt, and dried rosemary and set it aside while I peeled and cut three large carrots into large pieces, finely chopped three celery stalks, minced a large yellow onion and a clove of garlic. I browned the meat in olive oil and set it aside. The onion and garlic were saut
