On Canyoneering, Politics, and Teens Studying Climate Change

[Iceaxe]

Some interesting info on guiding in Zion buried in this story... and a lot of bogus info as well.... unless Canyonlands is a canyoneering hotbed that I don't know about....

On Canyoneering, Politics, and Teens Studying Climate Change in the National Parks
Kurt Repanshek


Slipping from the top of the arch into the abyss below was not a difficult move, but it certainly rattled my psyche. Even though the sandstone band I was perched on was not much more than 4 feet wide, it was stable. Even though it towered some 100 feet above the wash down below, it felt secure. Putting my faith into the rope cinched to my climbing harness and dropping into the void down below went completely against my desire for self-preservation.

And yet, it quickly became an incredible experience forever seared into my memory as I slowly lowered myself to the canyon floor in the grotto below, pausing at times to twirl 360 degrees and visibly inhale the red-rock landscape. Moments later, after patiently talking my then 9-year-old son to push himself off the arch, I was rewarded to hear his yelps of delight as his fears were quickly overcome by one of the "coolest things" he had ever done in his young life.

Canyoneering is one of the most exhilarating ways to experience southern Utah's canyon country. Descending on a rope into the gulf down below brings you face-to-face not just with the landscape in a most unusual way, but it opens up for exploration grottoes and canyons that you otherwise likely would never see. And it measures, and often strengthens, your mettle.

Arches and Canyonlands national parks are well-known haunts for those who canyoneer. While the experience I recalled above was on U.S. Bureau of Land Management lands, not National Park Service grounds where they don't take kindly to folks who tread atop arches, I later would venture several more times into canyon country with a rope, and those treks did take me into the backcountry of a national park. All those trips were led by a commercial guide, as I had neither the gear nor the experience to embark on such a trip myself. Paddling is my forte, not descending slickrock slopes greater than 45-degrees or to the brink of cliffs from which you descend into nothingness with hopes of settling back onto terra firma.

While Zion National Park is another great rockscape perfect for canyoneering, my odds of experiencing it are not particularly good, for that park does not allow commercial guides to work in its backcountry. That came to light last week when a Utah man was convicted of illegally offering canyoneering treks into Zion. Why Arches and Canyonlands allow these guides and Zion does not is both easy to explain yet somewhat difficult to understand.

Bonnie Schwartz, the chief ranger at Zion, tells me that, quite simply, when the park's General Management Plan was last updated, back in 2001, no one cared enough about commercially guided canyoneering trips to see that such an activity was included in the GMP.