Zion Mystery

[french_de]

We descended Mystery on Tuesday Morning July 22, 2008. I had applied for the ZION
NP Back Country lottery for Mystery back in May and won which is a surprise because I never win anything. Even by early morning the first hour of descent was pretty hot. When we reached the long dark wall section it really did feel like a humid North Carolina summer day. It cooled off pretty quick by the time we reached the narrows. Another smaller group caught up with us when we took a break past the dam. It turned out that we new them and they knew us. Man! it's a small world. We let them go ahead us. When we got to Mystery spring, the party ahead us still had their 300 foot doubled 10Mm semi static rope rigged. We took their offer to go down on their rope. Thanks Shawn! By the way, pulling up a wet, doubled, 10mm, semi static and hanging more than 100 feet rope to rig for rappel is hard. Once on rappel the weight alone creates its own belay. Mystery Springs and the rappel off the walkout ledge was an incredible experience.
The final rappel down the waterfall and into the narrows was a blast. Again we used the 10mm rope. The requirement here was to descend as gracefully as possible so as not to end up on some tourists' stupid tricks video. It was a little hard for me. I slipped a couple of times and each time this happened, the semi static rope would spring me back up a couple feet. I felt like a yo-yo. It was fun. Mystery is an amazing canyon.

[trackrunner]

nice

m00200.JPG shows the slope of mystery spring rappel ledge better than any picture I've seen before

[Iceaxe]

The Virgin looks ugly with all that mud.

[french_de]

The Virgin looks ugly with all that mud.

It actually looked a lot better than it did Monday morning. Monday saw a lot of floating fire debris which darkened the water.