The first rappel, and the first short swim, while were still out in the relative open.
Clearing weather allowed for a descent of the Pine Creek slot, one of the Zion classics. I hadn’t been through this slot before but a friend who was with us had done it several times.
He said it’s usually not too wet. That wasn’t the case here today, due to the prior days rain there was still a small flow of water moving through the slot, and all of the pools were full. So we knew it was going to be a wet, cold one.
About four rappels into it, we entered a really cool “room” they call Twin Arches Cavern.
Cold hands.
Using the pack as a kickboard through a long swimming section.
By now we had done about 6 or 7 raps of different lengths, all of which ended with a swim.
Fletcher descends the second-to-last rappel, the only one that didn’t leave us floating in a pool. You can see the amount of water flowing through the slot. Not enough to cause problems but enough water to keep the pools full.
And the big one, a 90 foot single strand rappel was the end of the run down the slot. All the way down to the pool below.
Looking up at Joey in the middle of the 90 footer. After this, there’s a somewhat long hike out lower Pine Creek. The slot widens to a more typical creek bed width, but it’s still challenging to get through some of the talus and boulders before you can hike out to the highway and shuttle home.
It was about two hours to get through the narrows, I edited down some footage into the video below:
Leave a Reply