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teen inches wide, to get to the platform where two bolt-and-hanger sets
provide an anchor for the rappel. Rappel bolts are typically three-inch-long,
three-eighths-inch-diameter expansion bolts set in either hand- or
cordless-drilled holes that secure a disc of flat metal bent into an L-shape
called a hanger. The hangers have two holes, one in the flush section for the
bolt to hold it to the wall, and one in the bent lip that can be clipped by a
carabiner, a screw-gate chain link, or threaded with a length of webbing. When
the bolt is properly installed in solid rock, you can load several thousand
pounds on it without concern, but in slot canyons, the rock often rots around
the bolt shaft due to frequent flooding events. It's reassuring when there are
two bolt/hangers that can be used in tandem, in case one unexpectedly fails.
I have my climbing rope, harness, belay device, and webbing with me for the
rappel, and I have my headlamp along to search crevices for snakes before
putting my hands in them. I'm already thinking ahead to the hike after the
rappel, especially the Great Gallery. Kelsey's guidebook calls it the best
pictograph panel on the Colorado Plateau -- and the Barrier Creek style,
"the style against which all others are compared" -- which has piqued
my interest since I read about it on my drive to Utah two days ago.
Gold in my hair / In a country pool / Standing and waving / The rain, wind
on the runway.
I'm caught up in another song and barely notice the canyon walls closing in,
forming the beginning of the slot, this one more like a back alley between a
couple of self-storage warehouses than the skyscrapers of the upper slot. An
anthemic guitar riff accompanies me as my stride turns into more of a strut and
I pump my right fist in the air. Then I reach the first drop-off in the floor of
the canyon, a dryfall. Were there water in the canyon, this would be a
waterfall. A harder layer embedded in the sandstone has proved more resistant to
erosion by the floods, and this dark conglomerate forms the lip at the drop.
From the ledge where I'm standing to the continuing canyon bottom is about ten
feet. About twenty feet downcanyon, an S-shaped log is jammed between the walls.
It would provide an easier descent path if I could get to it, but it seems more
difficult to access via the shallow and sloping conglomerate shelf on my right
than by the ten-foot drop to the canyon floor over the lip in front of me.
I use a few good in-cut handholds on my left to lower myself around the
overhang, gripping the sandstone huecos -- water-hollowed holes in the wall --
like jug handles. At full extension, my legs dangle two, maybe three feet off
the floor. I let go and drop off the dryfall, landing in a sandy concavity
carved deeper than the surrounding floor by the impact of floodwaters dropping
over the lip. My feet hit the dried mud, which cracks and crumbles like plaster;
I sink up to my shoe tops in the powdery platelets. It's not a difficult
maneuver, but I couldn't climb directly up the drop-off from below. I'm
committed to my course; there's no going back.
A new song starts up in my headphones as I walk under the S-log, and the
canyon deepens to thirty feet below the tops of the sand domes overhead.
I fear I never told you the story of the ghost / That I once knew and
talked to, of whom I never boast.
The pale sky is still visible above this ten-foot-wide gash in the earth's
surface. In my path are two van-sized chockstones a hundred feet apart. One is
just a foot off the sandy canyon bottom; the next sits square on the corridor
floor. I scramble over both blockages. The canyon narrows to four feet wide,
with undulating and twisting walls that lead me to the left then back to the
right, through a straight passage, then left and right again, all the while
deepening.
From Between A Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston, pages 1-30. Copyright © 2004 by Aron Ralston. All rights reserved, no part of this excerpt maybe reproduced without specific permission from the publisher.
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