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WARNING - A Night in Chute Canyon
On Sunday November 14, 2010, I did Baptist Draw with my partner Norman. Everything we read suggested that going up Chute Canyon from Baptist Draw would be quite simple. The hike was supposed to take around 3-4 hours for someone in good shape. Norm and I were a little out of shape, so we allowed ourselves 6 hours to be on the safe side. It was also our first technical slot canyon, though Norman has been a climber since his 20's. (He was 63 at the time of this incident, I'm 49). We got a bit of a late start, because we wanted to be sure the weather stayed good. The week prior had been snow, rain, and we had delayed this trip for a week.
Anyhow, we got a later start than planned, around 10:30 AM. We did two rappels in Baptist Draw and then the 75ft rap into Chute Canyon. After we pulled our rope we saw that someone had written a warning on the wall in charcoal (from a fire someone had had recently. Possibly someone else spent the night before here also). The warning read "No Way Out! Turn Back! We hoped it was a sick joke, but we ran into the same conditions as Pablomoses did in 2006. The water was past waist deep, and the mud sucked Norman down. He had a hard time getting back out again after only going a couple of feet into the pool. The water was high up on the boulder blocking the slot at the far end, up Canyon.
It was quite late in the afternoon by now, as we hadn't rushed, and it was getting cold in the canyon. We checked out down canyon, and came to the first rap into a deep pool. I'm fairly new to rapelling, and this one seemed tricky, and was also afraid that I'd drown in the pool with my pack on. (Lots of nightmares about drowning), and it was too difficult to get around with our current canyoneering skills.
In the end we decided it was too late in the day to risk going in either direction, getting wet, and possibly hypothermic. We decided to spend the night in the canyon, and hope for the best. We had to deal with a mouse trying to get our food and water (which we were now rationing), and my emergency bivy tore in three places. It was a long night.
The next day we looked at the mud pool up canyon again, and decided to go south, or down canyon instead. We set up a zip line to get the packs over the deep pool, so I didn't have to worry about drowning. We got wet many times, but luckily temps wern't as bad as they could have been. It snowed a bit. We ran out of water and managed to squeeze a liter from a frozen pool we found on a high ledge. As I mentioned, we wern't in tip-top shape after working all summer, so it was late in the day by the time we got to Fault Line Canyon.
At the top of that we struck north to get back to our camp and vehicle, but there was another canyon in our way. Because we hadn't planned to do this route, we didn't know much about it. We also only had a NatGeo Topo road map of the area, so it was difficult to figure out the best route. In the end we took a compass bearing directly west, until we hit a road, then we had another 4.5 miles of road to walk back to camp. It was smarter than wondering around on the plateau trying to miss the big canyon. In the dark it looked impossible to cross, but I'm sure we could have done it in the day light.
That road went on forever. I was so dehydrated that I couldn't stand upright, I'd just topple, so I just kept on walking. We both got into one of those hikers trances, kind of like a meditation. Then finally we were in the area we camped, but we couldn't find the vehicle. Everything was so different in the dark and moonlight, and there were no other people up there. (And hadn't been since Saturday). We spent another hour trying to find the Land Cruiser. Turns our we'd stopped short of it by about 75 ft. We finally found it, and boy did that electrolyte enhanced water taste good.
When we looked at the time we were amazed to see it was 12:30 AM on Tuesday morning. Our little 4-6 hour jaunt had turned into a 38-hour ordeal.
Needless to say we have gone over, and over, this incident. We had everything we needed to survive. The one thing we would have done differently is have a water filter with us, instead of iodine tablets, which needed four hours to work (NOT!). Otherwise I think we made all the right decisions. After reading pablomoses's account of the pool, we're so glad we didn't go north. In future we will also have extra climbing gear, because we may have been able to climb out, and will also research A LOT more. When we got back to Colorado I searched online for two weeks before I found anything about the section of Chute Canyon north of Baptist Draw. Everything else I read made it sound like a walk in the park, with no warnings. (Other than the one stressed in Kelsey's book, about how conditions can change with every flash flood).
All-in-all Baptist Draw is a beautiful slot, and Chute is impressive. The last flash flood had left mud marks above my head. We estimated about a week before. (I'm 5' 1"). We may go back and do the lower sections of Chute some time. But not too soon....
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