So here is my first post.
On the weekend of March 28-29, my brother Mike, my friends Corin and Ben, and myself went to the San Rafael Swell to do some canyoneering. It was our first trip for the year. I decided to go down the Squeeze. I have had my eye on it for two years or so now but could never work out a time to go down it. It is supposed to be a pothole romp.
Given the wet winter we have had I was expecting the canyon to have a lot of cold water so we all brought thick wetsuits with us. Unfortunately the canyon was almost dry! More than half of the potholes were bone dry. The remaining had water that was anywhere from ankle deep to waist deep, but tended to be closer to ankle deep. We still put on our wetsuits at the first sign of water thinking we would run into some sooner or later. We were disappointed that there was not much water at all. But, it was still a lot of fun to go down. I can't remember how many rappels we did but I would guess there were 15-18 of them.
I brought two 100' ropes with us. We had a hard time finding a good place to drop into the canyon, we finally found an arch and we slung an anchor around it and rappeled in. It ended up being about 103' long, my 100 foot ropes were just a little short, but were close enough to go down. There were two other rappels about 100' long, most of the others were less than 30'.
There were also multiple keeper potholes. I lost track of how many of these there were as well, I want to say there were 8 or 9 of them. One of the potholes was already rigged with some webbing for a tyrolean. We were able to push and pull each other out of the remaining potholes. If there was enough water to make them swimmers we would have needed to use slightly more exotic methods to escape them such as pack tosses or hooks to get out.
Anyway, I have some pictures. If Ben and Mike send me their pictures I will post those as well.
My pictures are not that good. On some of them there was a film of water over the lense on my waterproof case and that helped blur the picture. Oh well.
