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| Justin Pugh tossing the rope bag in Dark Shadow Canyon |
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.
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| Justin going down Dark Shadow Canyon, California. |
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.
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| At the top of Dark shadow canyon, Death Valley California. |
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.
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| Eileen coming down the first rap in Dark Shadow Canyon, California. |
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.
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| Yannick and Nick working on building an anchor in Dark Shadow Canyon, California. |
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.
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| Nick in Dark Shadow Canyon, California. |
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.
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| Nick in Dark Shadow Canyon, California. |
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.
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| Yannick in Dark Shadow Canyon, California. |
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.
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| Brie in Dark Shadow Canyon, California. |
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.
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| a small narrow section in Dark Shadow Canyon, California. |
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.
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| Fredrick in Dark Shadow Canyon, California. |
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.
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| Bryan in Dark Shadow Canyon, California. |
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.
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| Justin negotiating through the v crack in Dark Shadow canyon. |
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.
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| Brian coming down Dark Shadow canyon. |
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.
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| Brian and Justin building an anchor in Dark Shadow canyon |
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.
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| Eileen dropping into fall canyon |
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.
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| The last drop of of the dark shadow canyon |
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.
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| Jessica belaying from the bottom. |
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.
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| Brie Descending the last rap in fall canyon. |
We were burning daylight so it was on to Craters of Doom through a sneak route that took us back tot he ridge.
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| Bottom of Dark Shadow canyon in fall Canyon |
