It drains to here. So, say that little storm cell was breaking over this part of the canyon. All the rain hitting the slick rock would roll on down to the drainage and funnel into here...
and then it gets squeezed into here...
...and then into here. An inch of water a hundred feet wide forced into a slot that's 2 feet wide gets pretty deep and pretty fast in a big hurry. It carries a lot of force. Which is why it's a really good idea to keep an eye on the weather when hiking canyon country.
So, mom, forget you saw that picture of the storm cell in the last post.
After this point it becomes very narrow - a tight squeeze really - and since the slot is about three times as deep as peek-a-boo it gets dark too. You'll have to take my word for it so here's the scoop on Spooky gulch: gets so narrow you have to take off your pack, goes up and down around boulder and logjams from flash floods - one of which contained a small rattler (yikes). At one point it got downright obnoxious (and this is the only climb I've ever done to merit such a tag) had to take off my day pack, wriggle it around a bend and drop it 6 feet to the floor before then having to do the same myself. It finally widened out again towards the end and spilled into the same drainage a few hundred feet downstream from where we'd clambered up into peekaboo.
What you can't see in this photo is the scrape on PHred's adam's apple which he got slithering through one of the narrowest spots in the gulch. Crazy!
this is the fourth post in a series on the canyon country road trip
No comments:
Post a Comment