Death Valley National park continues to hold my interest after nearly 7 years of visiting the vast desert basin of one of the worlds lowest elevation points.

Scott Swaney has exceeded the 300 first descents mark and continues to find new canyons when Death Valley is in season, which is usually November thru march.

Every year a gathering of canyoneers meet up to talk about canyoneering and go check out some of Death Valley's finest, this year was no exception.

After falling asleep in what appeared to be just a few minutes later it was 4 hours later and I headed over to Yannicks house so we could make the Fall Canyon trail head by 7AM. 

The darkness slowly fading away into the blue hour was quickly shades of yellow and soon to be orange with the tones of the morning sun light as we passed through furnace creek and made our way to Fall canyon. 

The core of our group was made out of 9 canyoneers with a lot of them having caving backgrounds.  Justin Pugh, Brie Aseltine, Eileen Beall, Yannikc Chaigneau, Brian Shin, Jessica Leila, Nick Kowalczyk, Fredrick Farnstorm, and myself.

Our ambitious plans are to go for Crater of Doom first and than grab Dark Shadow canyon in one long day. We headed out at around 8AM and followed the ridge up to a plain that we traversed before to get to Deep Chasm canyon.

Fall Canyon has some nice canyons for Death Valley standards and so far Yannick and I enjoyed Deep Chasm canyon so we thought we would go ahead and grab these other canyons in the area.

We continued to head over the ridge and around a spur to descend down into dark shadow. We made a great choice to Descend Dark Shadow since it was first and we found out that the hike from the ridge to Crater of Doom would have been a bit choppy.

We decided to head for Dark shadow and we made our way down to the first rap just a couple hours after leaving the trailhead.

Dark shadow had around 10 raps that we all less than 200ft.  I feel there were less than 150ft. Please check the beta on www.ropewiki.com for more information on what to bring for the route.

The canyon was quite open for a while with some nice views of the basin below. We found some small sections of narrow passage but they were short lived.

The best part of the canyon was the last two drops which our into fall canyon. The sequencing was not as dramatic as Deep Chasm but this section had its interesting charm to it.

The anchor and webbing were pretty shot so a new anchor with new webbing was built carefully. The station was awkward because it was in a overhanging V slot so we had to position the rapide just right or we could risk sticking the rope.

This meant that people would have to wedge and crawl, on rope, over to the edge in a way that might torque the anchor, which was not the most enjoyable situation.  We built another anchor to back up the deadman, we set up a re direct so we could lower people (on belay) to the anchor, and we re positioned the anchor so that people wouldn't have to go as far past the anchor.

Another option could have been to set up a back anchor and have people get on rope and rap off the back anchor and LAMAR would get on the deadman but we chose the former route as it felt the most comforting to everyone. 

I did not find the rap to be to awkward but it was tight to get through. This took us down to a platform where we had another 50 of sloping drop to descend and to the bottom of Dark Shadow Canyon.

This canyon was ok as it had it moments but I enjoyed deep chasm more and Crater of Doom was one of the best surprises that we encountered in a while. It was still nice to do another second descent in death Valley.

We were burning daylight so it was on to Craters of Doom through a sneak route that took us back tot he ridge.