Looking down from our starting point, I can see a beautiful beach, clear flowing water, and the suns reflection off the riffles into of the water.
The steps are large but obvious,one false move could send you on a tumble down a layer, possibly two.
Your balance is dependent on your footing, the 35 lbs of weight in your backpack, and your next moves.
Continue forward and downward as we attempt to loose the gain in under a couple mikes.
The sun continues to develop radiance and heat as our legs start to shake and tremble from the sloping angle of the trail
.
I feel like I am looking farther below us than in front of us as we seek our beach front property for the weekend.
Ehh, this will be a relaxing day in this season of Grand Canyoneering
The UPS trail is quite steep but straightforward as you lose more elevation than we will distance.
Our steps are calculated but a trail of sorts leads us into south canyon
Continuing down the redwall appears and the canyon co tinies to deepen.
We hike around and down to the beach by late morning
The team heads back up and around to check out south canyon narrows and climb down into the scenic section of the canyon
I opted to stay at the beach and enjoy some Solitude and relaxation
A couple hours later the team emerges from the canyon reporting extremely
Low water levels and the use of rope that was needed
Indeed, this year has been quite low for
water in the big ditch
The following day we get a late start of 8 am and gain the top bench of the redwall
We continue north up and around a fairly straightforward direction to a beach where we will make a river crossing to gain 29 mile canyon.
Once again I am in a selvar boat while everyone unrolls their alpacka vor variant .paxkrafting in this boat is rather unsettling for me and the river crossing is flowing quite well.
We manage to thread between boils and dart across the river in time to catch the other side.
Deflating our rafts, we have another trail to take on the redwall bench leading over to the tail end of the canyon.
Working down into this canyon, it is obvious to us that the water levels are extremely low.
No issues were encountered and we were able to rap through the 5-6 raps that we encountered which were up to 70 feet in length
Although this canyon was short, it was scenic in nature and I do recommend this particular route that we took which includes more packrafting fun.
We get through the canyon in a couple hours and make our way to the beach.
Yannick decides to run the rapids as the remainder of the team opts to put in beyond the rapid
.
The riffle ahead was rather tame and the take out for the next rapid we easy enough to get out and move to the put in beyond the rapids
We continued down river and encountered riffles that were rather tame along with calm yet slowly moving waters.
After a couple Miles of river we made it back to the south beach camp.
We all opted to run the riddle at camp which was a bit more involving but we stayed to our left and it was straightforward.
Yannick and Ben continued down to redwall caverns where they were met with a beach party of rafters and beer
We even managed to find full beers floating down the river.
The following day we hiked out which took us a couple hours.
What an excellent weekend of great weather and company
Wash via south canyon as it’s a chill 2 1/2 days of canyon fun.
You could Prob get this done with one night at the beach if you are pressed for time.
Enjoy this beautiful section of the Grand Canyon.
