Eye of the Needle. August 15, 2014
First, I want to be clear. I think that this canyon and a few others on the edge of Zion, belong protected in the park with appropriate public access. However, that is not the current situation. Zion Adventure Center (ZAC) has a concession to access the canyon with the land owner who controls access to the canyon. Since I don't like crawling under other people's fences, I was happy to pay for what ZAC called an Extreme Adventure Day. Diana Hall was my guide and she was also training Assam Saidi to guide the route so it was like having two guides. I brought with me two cameras: My Leica M9 with the 21 mm f/2.8 lens carefully packed away in its own water tight bag, and my Canon 90S in a dive case. The Canon takes good pictures and the Leica takes amazing pictures.
I arrived at ZAC at 7 AM and soon we were headed up dirt roads near the Kolob Reservior. I won't pretend to know what is feeding Oak Creek but it was roaring with water and we got ready to rap in. After a couple of beautiful wraps we go to the meat of the matter: The eye of the needle. A small arch in the middle of a very long waterfall. The rappel was rigged to go through the eye. Just amazing. While there was plenty of water, for the most part the canyon allowed one to stand just outside the water flow. I think there were about 8 raps. Soon we finished and reached the confluence of what I think is the middle fork of Oak Creek. We returned a ways up this canyon to reach a location were fixed ropes had been place to permit a 420 feet of rope ascending in 4 pitches. I did fine until the last over hanging section. I had to ditch my pack to finish the ascent. Fortunately my guides were happy to send a rope down for it. We were back at the Zion Adventure Center at about 6 PM. Fun day. Beautiful canyon. Enjoy the photos. Yes they put me in the orange jumpsuit!
Ken
