Neon Canyon 5/7 and 5/11

[shaggy125]

So the pictures in this TR are a little different than usual. On May 6th we hiked into Fence Canyon and did Neon on the 7th. We hiked quite a ways past where most of the guidebooks have you drop in but the whole canyon is so good you can kind of build your own adventure depending on how long of a day you are looking for. The canyon was great. Lots of water, jumps, slides, potholes, etc... The keeper's lip was still about 1 1/2 feet under water so it has yet to go into full keeper mode this spring.

After Neon we did Choprock and some other canyons around Escalante. On the 10th we met up with Ram who had the idea to do upper Neon from the Moody Creek trailhead. We didn't know of an exit but had some ideas of stuff that might work so we dropped in hoping we could get out. The upper canyon had a beautiful riparian section with an awesome slide, a few great slot sections, and swims. We were able to make it to our footprints from 4 days before which is where we turned around and found a sketchy, but reasonable escape from the canyon. As a result, I was able to do the entire canyon just in two day trips rather than one.

For the blog post I decided to put the photos in order, first from the upper section on the 11th, then the lower section down to the river on the 7th so the photos are in order as if we had done a trip from the top all the way down. I'll post a few teasers on here but there are more photos on my blog:

http://utoutdoors.blogspot.com/2010/05/neon-canyon.html

Look for more TR's soon. I spent ten days down there and finally bought a waterproof point and shoot so I actually have pictures from all of them. :)

[asdf]

awesome photos

[Don]

Wow. Nice shots.

[oldno7]

Yea, nice shots, whats your new camera?

[Iceaxe]

[Scott Card]

Great stuff! Thanks

[ststephen]

Well done. If the rest of the pics are like those, I can't wait!

[Cirrus2000]

Beautiful! Nice job. I love how this one turned out:



Great detail for the fore and middle ground.

oldno7, from the Picasa album:

Camera: OLYMPUS IMAGING CORP.
Model: StylusTough-3000

[mrbrejcha]

Scasch looks stoked out of his gord.

Nice shots Eric! For serious. Thanks for posting those bad boys up. How 'bout Chop pics?

[jman]

nice shots!

[shaggy125]

Yea, nice shots, whats your new camera?

Thanks for the comments. Kevin is right, the new cheapest Olympus waterproof camera. I was happy to see it has a spot metering feature since this is what I used to use on my old point and shoot (before it drown in Imlay 4 or 5 years ago) so it was pretty easy to get used to taking pictures with (although it's more sensitive than my old camera and can be hard to lock in the right exposure sometimes). Of course I had to take a lot of pictures a little underexposed to keep the shutter speeds reasonable in the dark slot then I lightened them up a bit in photoshop. Also had to do quite a bit of fixing the overexposed sections. All in all though, the post processing has been pretty painless and I'm happy with the results. Matt, I had to work on photos from BO for Tom's rave and now I'm working on the Chop pics so they will be up next.

[oldno7]

Thanks for the information. My Olympus(850SW) is not that good(maybe operator error). I was thinking of the Canon, but this looks like a serious contender.

[shaggy125]

Thanks for the information. My Olympus(850SW) is not that good(maybe operator error). I was thinking of the Canon, but this looks like a serious contender.

I almost bought the Canon, they were on clearance since a new model is coming out or just came out. The deciding factor was the Canon doesn't have as wide of an angle as the Olympus and Panasonic. It does have a lower min. f-stop though which would help in dark slots. I'd look at what the features are on the new one, maybe they added a wide angle? Sony just came out with a waterproof camera that seemed pretty good. Stefan was using it on our trip, would be worth looking into. I hated the waterproof Olympus' when they first came out. They were expensive and photos looked as bad as my cell phone camera. They have improved for sure and at only $199 I gave in and bought one. With Canon and Sony joining it looks like there is a market for these cameras which means they will only get better. :)

[seb42]

Great report! Five weeks and counting til we arrive in Zion!!! Can't come soon enough.