Holy new favorite canyon! Choprock was awesome, and we had an excellent trip. It was Gavin's and my spring break and Anthony and Jayson came with us down to Escalante. We left early Thursday morning and got to the Egypt Trailhead around 9:00 to see about nine other cars there. We were worried that all of the good camping spots would be taken, but we were able to secure a pretty nice one at the mouth of Fence Canyon. We set up camp and then headed downriver for the afternoon. We made a quick stop at the Golden Cathedral and then went down to Ringtail. We just went up from the bottom, but it was pretty awesome. One of the darkest slots I've ever been in. We went up that canyon until we ran into a group of about 12 really loud middle schoolers and then turned around and headed back to camp to relax and turn in early in preparation for our big day.
On Friday we woke up before the sun, and then wasted the fact that we woke up before the sun as we wandered around in the dark trying to find the weakness in the canyon wall that Shane talks about in his Choprock description. Once it started to lighten up outside we found it and headed up. The approach was pretty dang long, and included a fair amount of trudging through sand, but we eventually dropped into the canyon.
Things were just starting to leaf out in the Riparian Ballroom, and all of the poison ivy was dead, though we weren't sure if it was still potent like that or not, so we steered clear of it. Eventually we hit the Happy Section, and about four steps into it I yelled something to the effect of "Holy crap! This is amazing! That whole approach just became worth it!" Seriously, though, the Happy Section of Choprock beats the crap out of the Subway as far as beauty goes, in my opinion. It's amazing.
The Happy Section turned into the Grim Section rather abruptly, I thought, and it did start out pretty grim, with a tall log jam to climb (a big log at the top going lengthwise down the canyon made it a pretty tight squeeze for me) and then a really tight narrow spot. However, after that things were pretty tame. I'm not saying that they always will be, and there was definitely a lot of challenging stuff. Several spots of high stemming, a whole lot of narrow cracks to slide down, and a few spots where we had to swim. Light was excellent down there, and after one swim we got out and stood in the sun and found that we were steaming! I guess we're just that awesome. The Grim Section turned out to be a great time, and I even got to use my strength to break a log jam! All too soon we were hitting the final rappel and leaving the technical section behind. A hike back to camp and a good night's sleep, and we were out of there. Awesome trip! Highly recommended to anyone with the skills! Here's some pictures (We were a little busy in the grim section so we only got a couple in there. We have some video, though. I'll post it once I have it edited. Our photographer, as usual, is the amazing Anthony Dunster.):
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