Muddy Cedar Mesa Slots

[ghawk]

Last weekend Jayson and I headed down to the Cedar Mesa area to do some slots. It had rained a day or two before that, so we were pretty excited to get some swimmers in. We drove down Thursday Night and met up with Dustin to do Cheesebox Friday morning. This was my first canyon with my new insoles that a few people recommended. I got the sof Sole athlete insoles for $15 and they worked great. Anyway, here's the canyons we did.

Cheesebox
We headed in and found a very muddy canyon. We were slipping an sliding all over. All of us fell down a few times because it was so slick, but we all had a great time. Cheesebox is a pretty canyon with fairly straightforward obstacles. We spotted a few sections with some swiss cheese like rock structures that were pretty cool. There were a few swimmers of maybe 20-30 feet that were pretty fun. Towards the end we thought we were pretty much done with the swimming and took off our wetsuits. However, a few more minutes down canyon it slotted up again and it looked like a lot of water in the bottom. Dustin and I were able to do a fairly exposed move to stem above the water and get onto the ledge above. Jayson didn't feel comfortable with it and threw on his wetsuit. He must have swam 200 feet before getting to the other side. Most of the time I could walk on the ledge above him.. so I got to laugh at him as his backpack filled with water and slowed him down. We found the exit fine and finished the canyon in about 7 hours. It was a fun canyon.

Fry
Dustin had to take off to try and catch dinner with his family in Provo, so it was just Jayson and me. It was 4 pm now, so we headed over to Fry and pushed through that one as fast as we could because we didn't want to get caught in the dark. I really loved Fry canyon. The first section has beautiful sculpted narrows with pretty bands in the sandstone. The next section is a slog but isn't too long. Then there's one rappel with a 20-30 foot swim that was pretty fun. Finally we saw the Anasazi ruins up on the bench above us. There was nothing particularly difficult about this canyon, but it just had a lot of different things that combined to make it really enjoyable for me. Really pretty. I'll be taking my wife back to this one some time. We finished Fry in about 3 hours.

Duckett
We drove to the head of Duckett Friday night and camped there. We started our hike to the head and overshot it a bit (.4 miles can pass pretty quick) but found the wash and followed it to the head of the canyon. Duckett was a lot of fun. There was a lot of partner assist stuff where we had to be creative to get down the drops - made more difficult by the mud everywhere. We really enjoyed it. The last rappell was a little weird and, in retrospect, I should have re-rigged the whole thing. There was an upper anchor which would create a bad rope pull but was solid, and there was an extended anchor kind of wound through some roots and rocks and ended up at a nice location to make the rope pull clean. I had trouble inspecting that anchor because it was wound through so much stuff. I'm not sure why they felt it was necessary to do it that way but it made it hard to inspect. From what I could see the knots were good and the webbing clean, so I used my sling to connect it to the other anchor above it while I went down (in case the lower one failed) and I went down first because i weigh a lot more than Jayson and if it failed he could use the upper anchor. It all went smoothly and the anchor held, but thinking about it now, I should have rebuilt it so it was a cleaner set up. But the canyon was a blast. I highly recommend it. We finished Duckett in about 3 hours. We were going to head over and do Short canyon as well, but I was having some neck issues and we decided to call it a day and go grab some burgers. It was a fairly low key, but fun trip. Here's some pics



Cheesebox

Dustin dropped his water bottle down one of the first raps and it ended up in the very back of this low overhang. He said "do you think I can even get back that far?" I said "yeah, but let me grab a camera"


Lots of water and lots of mud












Jayson casting magic spells






Fry








Duckett









Someone must have stepped in the cement when they were putting in the canyon


Those were once my back pockets...

[Taylor]

We'll done, nice report. Gotta get down there sometime for some minislot action.

[ilipichicuma]

Nice work! I've wanted to check those ones out for a while. I'll have to head down there next summer. Loved the picture of Jayson casting a magic spell.

[oldno7]

I always said Cheesebox is my favorite canyon in the area.

Nice report.

[dustinsc]

Good report. Glad to see you did Ducket and Fry with no problems. We'll have to catch that Short Canyon some other time.

[Kuya]

Very nice! I need to get down into that area. Sounds like a lot of mud though. That definitely makes things a lot more interesting