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Thread: 1st Descent Mantrap (Johnnys Wash)

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    1st Descent Mantrap (Johnnys Wash)

    Late fall of 2018 I noticed a natural bridge off hwy 12 as I was going to calf creek to fish brown trout. Did some research and found out its called "mantrap natural bridge"
    So now i had to see it up close. It was already in my head to go thru it, but wasn't quite sure how big the drop below the mantrap was. Mid week girlfriend and I hiked to bottom on Escalante river and did some guesstimations which we were confident in. I went over and over satellite imagery to find an approach. The following saturday we picked up alot of webbing as I suspected anchor possibilities might be few.
    We set out on November 18th with all the gusto of lewis an clark as we had never attempted to do something without beta.
    Quite confident that we were not biting off more than we could chew. with that said we had 80 ft of webbing, and 340 of rope.
    we took our time on the approach and after about 5 minutes all footsteps disappeared as we began to ascend a crumbly gully.
    Route finding was easy to get to the descent gully I picked out on satellite.
    The descent gully offered some cool windows interesting boulders and a bunch of "watch your step" down hiking. And boom we were in the wash above the goal. we explored a bit up wash (canyon) and found what would be a 1st rap to the route. (looked to be 120-150 ft free hang)
    We moved on down wash and had easy walking. Coming to the mantrap there are Two well carved potholes.
    The first one sits behind mantrap intact and filled with water. The second is the mantrap and blown out on south side.
    Our plan was to anchor from some tree up there. Took a bit to decide which one for the best direction of pull.! We decided on one straight back. used all our new purchased webbing. Sent girlfriend into the mantrap first which is overhung and weird. (gonna lose some skin) then she continued thru and down. said it was cool. Now my turn and it was totally cool.
    The second rap down to the escalante river we anchored from an arch (which i wont do again) as I found better options after running several times since!
    a few days later we hiked back and cleaned our webbing. However the 2nd time I ran it, a few days later went back for webbing and it was gone ��������.
    so it was time to learn how to ghost.
    The 3rd time back we brought a friend and ghosted and had a blast.
    I enjoy mantrap much more than Uturn in Arches. to giva ya a comparison.
    not a destination canyon but a way to kill a few hours in the area.
    Not sure if first descent but I sent an email to a canyoneer that would know about 9 months ago and he never got back to confirm or deny!

    https://youtu.be/To96mIIm6Ik
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