Mystery Canyon Report: 1/15/11

[shummer]

I went through Mystery on Saturday. The trail up to the the observation point fork was fine, after that we broke trail for the half mile to the drop-in. We dropped in at 3 pm. The canyon took about 6.5 hours and because of that, we spent most of the canyon in the dark.

We had to slide, posthole, tumble through about 2 feet of snow before dropping into the slot. The sketchy little downclimbs were made easier by the snow and we didn't end up setting up a rope until the first real rappel. Those rappels all went smooth but somewhere between the 4th and 5th rappel we ran into a bit of a problem.

Where the canyon really narrows, and is usually just a downclimb, sheets of ice had formed. Some giant, Buick sized icicles had come unloose and blocked most of the passage. We had to build an anchor and quickly slide into the passage. We then pulled the roped, hooked it around a huge ice pillar, and rappeled the rest of the way down. Between the amount of ice hanging over us, and the fact they seemed to come loose quite often, it seemed really sketchy and boogied out of there as fast as possible.

The rest of the canyon was pretty smooth. We had to build an anchor or two where ice or snow had covered the anchors, but beside that, we had no other problems. The second to last rappel had the handline still intact and we had to run our own little handline to get to it since the ice was pretty thick.

We rappelled into the narrows and hiked out under a waxing moon. All in all a pretty good trip.

[CarpeyBiggs]

wow. nice work! breakin' trail in those cascadia 5's? musta been cooold.

too bad about the camera, would've loved to see more photos.

[shummer]

The Cascadia's worked fine, since they are the greatest shoe known to man, until the observation point fork. After that I took them off and broke trail barefooted... like a real man.

[CarpeyBiggs]