Church Rock Canyon

[bjp]

About a month late, but here's a trip report from early May:


Pretty much every time I go somewhere, I always wonder whether all these little side canyons I pass on the way would make good canyoneering routes. Of course, the answer is almost always no because the good routes are usually long enough that you can't see the good stuff from a road, even with California's relatively wide-open canyons. So then I pull up Google Earth but I always get tripped up by the fact that nature is fractal - when there's a drop, it's hard to tell initially whether that's a ten-foot divet or a 400-foot cliff. So, it's hard to just eyeball a canyon in Google Earth and see if it might be a good route, even with the amazing 3D features. Fortunately, I'm an engineer and Google's amazing, so I was able to use their Earth SDK to write a little script that will automatically trace and display the elevation profile of a non-slot canyon. Somewhat to my surprise, it works really, really well (at least in California) - you can actually see where each individual waterfall is and how tall they are! It turns out this is only possible because Google has a bunch of not-otherwise-publically-available elevation data that is substantially higher resolution than the 1/3 arcsecond (one point every ~10 meters) standard dataset, but that's not important here.



I used my little tool to take a look at Catalina Island because 1) I had never seen anyone write about doing a canyon on Catalina before and 2) doing a canyon on an island sounded awesome. After a lot of investigation, I found a canyon that I thought wouldn't be terribly difficult to access and would lend itself to relatively convenient retrieval. I say 'relatively' because basically all the prospective canyons on Catalina empty onto isolated beaches surrounded by tall cliffs and the only viable extraction method is via boat (awesome!). In this particular case, the boat trip would only be 5 miles from Avalon Harbor and I figured my support team could just rent one of the small power boats there to come around and get us. My guess was that the canyon only had 5 rappels all under 100ft, but at least it was likely to be technical - this was looking like a pretty decent trip so I started making the preparations.


Ferry tickets, a hotel, and a hiking permit from the conservancy were no problem, but the extraction boat was a little harder. It turns out you're not actually allowed to take the standard boat rentals around the back side of the island, so I had come up with a different retrieval method. A guy at the rental shop referred me to a guy who was interested in doing it, but a week or two beforehand, this fell through. Fortunately, we managed to find a small charter snorkeling boat that would do the retrieval. The day before, I called up and confirmed: the two wives would board the boat in Avalon at 5pm, the boat would drive 5 miles around the back side of the island, my team would swim up to 500ft out to the boat and board, then we'd all ride back to Avalon by 6pm for a 7:30 ferry back to the mainland. My team was unfortunately down from 4 to 2, but the weather was still good and we were both fairly competent so we headed out to Catalina Friday night.


Saturday morning, we took a short taxi to the fire road trail and started hiking about 8:30am, giving us roughly 7 hours until the boat would arrive. The hike up is a popular day hike and has some great views; at points, it overlooks both sides of the island.



We left the main trail at 10:15 to descend into the canyon. I had originally planned to drop into the drainage earlier, but we discovered that bushwhacking through dense cactus is essentially impossible.



We scurried back up the ridge and followed it down until we were parallel where I thought the first rappel was, and then traversed down through much less cactus - canyon bottom at 11:15.



The first rappel was right where the tool placed it. Short, but a legitimate rappel - downclimbing would have been questionable.



The canyon had some interesting rock formations...for Southern California. After some easy downclimbing and hiking, R2 at 11:50.



Two rappels in and three to go, I was thinking maybe this canyon was basically never visited. I may have been wrong.



The biggest obstacle throughout the trip was very pokey cactus.



R3 still isn't huge, but it's the biggest rappel yet and it looks like it wouldn't be trivial to climb around - I'd expect this to be a big barrier to continuing downcanyon for non-canyoneers. Rigged with a fiddlestick at 1pm.



Just 20 minutes later, we're overlooking the ocean a couple hundred feet below. This is a wide open space we're sure to get a satellite message out from, so we send an Ok message via Spot.



R4 is a cool little minislot with a great view of our destination.



It turns out "R"5 isn't actually a rappel; it's just a series of down climbs. So, 4 total rappels in the canyon rather than 5, and tallest is maybe 30-40 ft. After all the down climbs, we ended up at our exit beach at 2:10pm.



Now comes one of the fun parts. This beach isn't very friendly for swimming and we don't want there to be any hiccups when we go to swim out to the extraction boat. So, I picked an alternate beach a few hundred feet around the shoreline I thought would be a good place to wait at and then swim from. But, we can't just walk over there - we have to swim. And we don't want to swim close to the rocks because they would knock both us and our gear around. We brought a little inflatable boat to manage the gear, and I have a cool towing PFD so we swam out a few hundred feet from shore and then over to the other beach (swim @ 7:12)



We reached the other beach at 3:15 - two hours early. Another Ok message via Spot and my partner took a nap while I explored the beach's cliff walls. It's a pretty sketchy scramble up scree, but it turns out it's possible to get back up above R4. This is overlooking the alternate beach.



I removed the webbing we had installed for the final rappel, so with 2 CEMs and a fiddlestick we left no anchors. I came back down and we explored down the beach a bit more and then it was time to get packed up and ready to swim out to the boat. There's really nothing else to do, so we got everything together by 5pm and then waited the 15 minutes I expected the boat to take to get to us. At 5:15 I redid the math and figured I had forgotten about the extra 5 minutes it takes to clear the harbor before the boat can really start going, so we should actually expect 5:20. At 5:25 I was thinking the group before us had probably taken a long time and the operator probably hadn't planned well to avoid the intragroup delay. At 5:40, my partner questioned whether maybe something had happened to our wives - after all, they knew the boat was our exit so if something happened with the charter they could still beg and plead with all the other boat owners out there to get a ride, or heck, just rent one of the basic boats and take it out of the designated area any way.


My partner and I started discussing alternatives: we could prepare to bivy on the beach, or we could try to reverse the canyon. I figured as soon as we got up the scree slope, that's exactly the time when the boat would come around the corner (Murphy's Law) so I was leaning toward sort of preparing to bivy on the beach but really I thought the boat would just end up coming late. My partner convinced me otherwise though as we knew there was a fire road only a few hundred vertical feet out of the canyon paralleling it so we would have a decent chance of escape, plus bivying in the canyon would be much more protected from wind than the beach. We only had the boat reserved from 5pm to 6pm, so we figured 6pm would be a good time to start the escape - that would give us 1:50 until sunset.


The messages programmed on the Spot were basically "Ok", "Please send non-emergency help", "Where is our ride??", and the emergency SOS. The third one seemed perhaps appropriate, but I thought the implication would be that we had decided to do something where we still wanted to get a ride. If our wives responded to that, we'd end up having a boat when we were already too far up the canyon to see it. "Ok" didn't quite seem appropriate since we were taking action not just chilling and being "ok". And of course we didn't need any help at this point. So, I planned to send an Ok message later when we got on the fire road or were forced to bivy. Instead, we left the bright orange boat on the beach so that any rescue boats that might be sent would see for sure that we had been there and left. We started up the scree slope. No boat.



Scrambling up the slope with heavy packs is substantially more difficult than with no load, but we managed to get up and then make a beeline up canyon. The escape drainage I identified beforehand was above R3 so I was a little concerned we wouldn't be able to get up it. Fortunately, I was able to climb up and above the rappel and then drop back down behind it. The climb was pretty sketchy though, so we set up a rope for my partner to ascend. I had him leave my pack tied to the end of the rope to help with minding the ascender, but we didn't get the tension right and it ended up just being a pain. Oh well; only twenty-some feet. Once he was on top, we went to pull up my bag andﾅsnap. The top loop had ripped free of its stitching so we had to go back down and re-tie it. Another ascent later and we were on top of R3 at 7:15.


Not too far up canyon, we started the climb out of the canyon. It wasn't clear we would actually be able to make it at a number of points, but fortunately there was always another way around. We reached the fire road just a few minutes before sunset and pulled out the Spot to send Ok - not too shabby! Of course, we weren't actually done yet; we still had 900 ft of gain before we could begin the 3.8 mile down hill back to Avalon. 900 ft of gain isn't much at the beginning of the day but man, it is a lot after a long day. I figure we had done about 700 or 800 of that 900 ft gain when we saw headlights. Hmm, that's probably for us. Yep, they called us up on our radios and asked if we were the lost hikers. I said well no, but probably. The SAR guys were very nice and drove us down the fire road - I'm not going to lie, it was nice not to have to hike those last 4+ miles...of course we would gladly have done it if we could have avoided SAR. Back in Avalon, our wives told us what had happened there.


They received our first Spot Ok near the drop in location - as expected. But then something unexpected happened with our pre-R4 Ok. When a lat/lng position is entered in Google Maps from a desktop computer, it shows both a green arrow with the position actually requested, plus a red arrow on the nearest road if there is a road within some distance. The Android version of Google shows the red arrow but NOT the green arrow (!!). So, they thought we were on the fire road at 1pm, and we had discussed that being there meant we were aborting the canyon. Our later 3:15 Ok message was shown at nearly the same location so then they started getting worried; why hadn't we moved in 2 hours? Meanwhile, the charter operator had called them up and said that a huge amount of unforecasted wind had come up on the east side of the island so it wouldn't be possible to go out. This didn't worry them initially since Spot indicated we were already aborting the canyon. But then hours later, they figured something was wrong. The SAR team was getting ready to send out a rescue boat to check the beach when the mountain team found us - we were told the diver was disappointed he didn't get to go out. So, fortunately, the effort wasn't that long or huge but it's still awful to be the cause.


Lessons learned:
* Being prepared and having a good backup plan are pretty important; we were glad to be carrying oodles of gear this time, and I was glad I researched the crap out of the route beforehand
* Weather can be very unpredictable; have to have a clear contingency plan in case of the worst
* Satellite messengers do not always improve communication; better to go through all possible scenarios with support people beforehand
* Be careful interpreting Spot's maps on mobile devices
* Cactus is sharp


--Ben

[ghawk]

Sounds like a fun adventure

[jman]

Oh my, what an adventure. Thanks for sharing that Ben.

Congrats on the "first" documented descent too. Always fun to claim that.

Pretty weird about the variation for spot on the mobile versions, and that makes perfect sense from your wives perspective.

I liked how you documented all of the times of all the rappels and climbs, etc. definitely a engineer mind. Lol

[Slot Machine]

Two rappels in and three to go, I was thinking maybe this canyon was basically never visited. I may have been wrong.

Abandoned polygamist compound?

Really Ben, nice report! I like your sense of adventure.

FWIW, I've found the altitude on Google Earth to be misleading, especially where cliffs drop off. Along the Escalante River for example, the altitude of the river itself decreases as you go UPstream (in some spots). Estimating a rappel length down to the river is nearly impossible in that area (using Google Earth).

It seems that GE 'guesses' the altitude, blurring some of it, along very jagged terrain. YMMV, but I wouldn't rely on it too heavily.

Bob

[bjp]

FWIW, I've found the altitude on Google Earth to be misleading, especially where cliffs drop off. Along the Escalante River for example, the altitude of the river itself decreases as you go UPstream (in some spots). Estimating a rappel length down to the river is nearly impossible in that area (using Google Earth).

It seems that GE 'guesses' the altitude, blurring some of it, along very jagged terrain. YMMV, but I wouldn't rely on it too heavily.

Yeah, GE pulls its data from different sources -- different areas may have substantially different altitude accuracies. In the case of Southern California, the accuracy is amazing good -- much better than is publicly available. That's not to say the imagery is always correctly registered to the elevation data. I checked out a few other places just to see.

It's possible to see the waterfalls in Havasupai, but it's clear the resolution isn't nearly as good as it is in Socal. And, the accuracy isn't good enough to always find the correct locations of the waterfalls (as opposed to nearby cliffs).

In Zion, the last two waterfalls in Lower Echo are obvious (a little over 100ft and 330ft or so), but nothing else (including in Upper Echo). Nothing in the slot part of Pine Creek is visible, but the last rappel is clearly obvious, and possibly the second to last one as well. It's clear that the Behunin entry rappels aren't a single rappel, but it only looks like 2 stages rather than 3. It's possible to see that the Behunin exit rappels are 2 stages rather than just 1. The two small rappels in upper Mystery (after the death gully) are obvious, but the separate rappels at the sharp left are not at all obvious -- just looking at the GE data, I'd expect to need a 250ft rope for that part of Mystery. Some of the other Mystery rappels look obvious to me though. From this, I'd guess that GE has higher resolution elevation data for Zion also, but perhaps not Havasupai. Looks like not Yankee Doodle either.

Long story short: quality/precision/accuracy of elevation data from GE varies, but it is quite good in some places. Sounds like maybe Escalante River doesn't have high res data, but you can check for yourself if you want -- this tool is a lot better than eyeballing by moving the cursor.