The Dark Side of Canyoneering 
Welcome to Utah... Now please leave!
(Published in July, 2002, Utah Outdoors magazine)

By Golden Webb

The invasion begins in the early warmth of spring. Human hordes of almost biblical proportions swarm out of the world’s throbbing metropolitan dynamos of commerce and pleasure—Salt Lake, London, Hamburg, Chicago, Tokyo—and descend on the Promised Land of southern Utah like a black cloud of locust. They come armed with the latest comprehensive guidebooks and clothed in the trendiest outdoor chic. They come looking for sand, slickrock, cliffrock and canyon. For sun, fun, bragging rights and adventure. Some are headed straight for injury or death—at Utah taxpayer expense. In some ways it’s a complete disaster. In many ways it’s like a plague. Where are those flocks of giant man-eating seagulls when we need them?

I’m talking about all the Vibram-soled, raggedy-ass yahoos who are suddenly clogging up our canyons. Sometimes when I’m in the outback and I encounter these capering idiots on the trail, I experience a sense of temporal dislocation, like watching Alec Baldwin talk presidential politics on TV. It’s a sense of: Who the hell are you? Why are you here? When are you going to shag your butt back to where you came from?

Stupid, misguided fools. Al Gore-voting, Strawpleberry Mocha Frappucino-sipping, Mother Jones-reading hipster-dirtbagger hoales.

I have a bit of a schizoid relationship with these people. First, to the extent that I’m a city boy from Salt Lake, I’m one of them. Second, I feel a kind of xenophobic loathing for them. Actually, it’s more like hatred. Ricardo Montalban summed up my general sentiments in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan:”

“From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee. For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.”

Used to be the only people you’d see in the dusty corners of Utah’s back-of-beyond were prospectors, miners, geologists, cowboys, truck drivers, polygamists and sheepherders. Now it’s an urban-suburban bouillabaisse of deodorized humanity: college student weenies, Euro-trash socialists, and outdoor-gear fetishists decked out for a mission to Mars. You’ve seen the type. What are they all doing here? Nobody seems to know.

Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe you picked up this magazine, saw a couple cool pictures, and are musing a trip to some remote canyon south of Salina. Not so fast. Before you go, consider the following irrefutable facts. Consider them. Very. Carefully.

1) There’s no real fun to be had down there. The area between Las Vegas, Reno and Denver is known as the Bermuda Triangle of fun. It just disappears, like light into a black hole. Remember, rural Utahns are all polygamous harem-keeping bigamists, and loathe sharing their women—there aren’t any strip clubs, or hookers, or girly mags in the gas station magazine stands. There are laws on the books against gambling. The beer’s only 3.2. Forget about drugs; the only way to get a chemical rush in southern Utah is to take a dump on a rattlesnake.

2) The locals hate outsiders. They post John Bircher-NRA nuts armed with bazookas outside every town. Any “sport utility vehicle” with California decals gets blown off the road; if the car gets past, a guy with a bullhorn races through the streets, screaming, “Lock up yer daughters! The Gentiles are a comin’!” If they happen to get their hands on you alive…well, you can probably guess what comes next. Ever seen “Deliverance?”

3) The place is ugly. This is how J.R.R. Tolkien once famously described it: “Before them dark in the dawn the great mountains reached up to roofs of smoke and cloud. Out from their feet were flung huge buttresses and broken hills. Frodo looked round in horror. More loathsome far was the country unveiled to his shrinking eyes. Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked in ash and crawling mud, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the land about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light. They had come at last to the desolation that lay before Moab: a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing—unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. ‘I feel sick,’ said Sam. Frodo did not speak.” (OK, so Tolkien wasn’t actually describing Moab, but he may as well have been).

4) Look at your topo maps. See the names? Devil Canyon. Brimstone Gulch. Death Hollow. He-LLO? It’s called DEATH Hollow! Mollies Nipple. I’d tell you how they came up with that name, but behold, I do not desire to harrow up the souls of men in casting before them such an awful scene.

5) The tree-huggers are lying. The environuts would have you believe that southern Utah is some kind of Shangri-La—the Bhutan of the American West. You really think they’re telling the truth? As Ehud Barak once said, famously, about environmentalists: “They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie…creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn’t. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as ‘the truth.’” (OK, so he wasn’t actually talking about environmentalists, but he may as well have been). It’s all a big scam. Groups like SUWA send you pretty postcards and ask you to send them your hard-earned money. But they don’t actually want you to come here. To understand this phenomenon, you have to understand environmentalists. An anonymous Internet wise man has identified three kinds: “First, the ‘I got mine environmentalists.’ Basically, these folks move into a pastoral setting and don’t want their view spoiled. They become anti-development. Next, the quasi-religious: No way do they want their Earth Mother getting drilled. Don’t even talk about it. Third, the Anticapitalist: Environmentalism as the last refuge of the Socialist. Formal ownership of property is allowed but no property rights. This avoids one huge drawback of public ownership—the government taking the rap for failure. Oh, I left out the ‘misanthropic nihilists.’ They’re fun. They hope for an apocalyptic population collapse down to the Earth’s carrying capacity of about 600 million souls. Don’t worry; Gaia will sort ’em out. The survivors can peaceably manure the fields and polish the solar mirrors—but can they keep their cell phones?” Most Utah environmentalists are “I got mine environmentalists.” I should know, because I’m a Utah environmentalist. I got mine, and I’m telling you: Stay the hell out.

I make a compelling case, no? But you’ve mulled it over, and still think you want to make the trip. What, you put on a little polypropylene underwear, and suddenly you’re Lawrence of Arabia? What, you think those dangly faux-turquoise earrings and that Kokopelli T-shirt makes you some kind of high priestess of the desert?

Fine. Have it your way. Welcome to the jungle, baby. Try not to die. Since I’m feeling generous, I’ll impart a little advice that just might help you stay alive:

1) Remember the Rule of Reversibility: Always leave yourself an out. If that means leaving an expensive rope behind at a drop that you probably won’t be able to retrieve—do it anyway. Ain’t anything worse than doggy paddling for hours in a cold pothole that you can’t reverse your way out of. Pretty soon the hypothermia sets in, your thrashing limbs turn into so much dead weight, and you’re toast. In the depths of a remote slot canyon, no one can hear you scream. Happens more often than you’d think.

2) Check the weather. If there’s even a hint of rain anywhere near the headwaters of the canyon you want to hike in, bag the trip. A canyon can “flash” even when the sky is clear overhead. Don’t screw around with this. A flash flood hits a slot canyon with the liquid-equivalent force of an F7 tornado.

3) Stay off walls you can’t climb, and out of slots you can’t handle. Giant clunky mountaineering boots are worthless for climbing and chimneying. I recently had to rescue a guy who’d strung himself out on a cliff near Spooky Gulch in the Escalante. He’d been betrayed by those 10-ton, $400 expedition boots he was wearing: too hard and slick to give any traction, too frickin’ heavy to even lift off the rock. Lightweight composite boots are best for most canyon terrain.

4) Always bring more water than you think you’ll need—at least two gallons of water per person, per day.

5) Be obsessive about exactly where you’re going, and exactly where you are. Watch your backtrail. Always carry the appropriate 7.5 series USGS topographic maps.

6) By all means, enlist the service of professionals. There are some terrific canyoneering guide services out there that can introduce you to amazing places that aren’t even on the topos. The Zion Adventure Company, based out of Springdale, offers a canyoneering school for those who want to learn the ropes, and a guide service for those who want to visit the hidden slots, pools, and waterfalls of Zion. For info: phone, (435) 772-1001; e-mail, info@zionadventures.com; web site, www.zionadventures.com.

So now you know all you need to know. But don’t think for a second that I’m happy about it. And the next time you’re hiking down-canyon, lost in your thoughts, and a sudden little frisson shivers down your back…that’s not the ghost of Edward Abbey blessing your passage.