Bailey (again...) and some other stuff

So yesterday I duo'd Bailey canyon for the fourth time, each time with a different person. It's a nice one... but I'm kinda done with it for a while. A canyon without flowing water just takes a lot of the fun and cool factor out of it. It also seems like every time I do the hike to get up to the drop-in point it gets harder when it should be getting easier. It was horrible, an hour in the sun and hot air. Thank god there was at least some little trickle of a stream flowing up near the drop-in for me to filter because I downed that entire bottle hiking up (filtered bottles ftw).


Oh yea... so far I've been 100% immune to poison oak. I've literally walked through a bush of it and brushed an arm against it a few times, but it usually washes off with all the water I go through and stuff. Yesterday I definitely grabbed a new growth that was ripe with sticky oil all over the leaves. Nothing yet in over 24 hours but I'll know in a day or two if I've defied it yet again!

So Bailey canyon... dry and overgrown, yet very green for the small-to-nonexistant amount of water that I've ever seen flow through it. Lots of bushwhacking even in-canyon. Lots of bees, gnats, spiders, beetles, and other annoying insects. I actually mistook a hummingbird for the growl of a mountain lion because it was in some crevice and its hum echoed quite loud and deep. One of the few nice things about this canyon is that at least half of the rappels are around 30 feet or under, and can be quickly and easily done by double-roping down my 65' rope.

Played around with my Totem a little more, for like the first 4 raps. I don't mind using it in its simplest ways but its more complex ways are just... not very comfortable and are actually hard to control a steady speed of descent with. More on the Totem later. But yea... I switched back to my Pirana for the rest of the canyon (I also got tired of the Totem swinging around and clanking... the Pirana has a nice tight fit into the biner and doesn't do so as much).

Yesterday we also opted to try having the two of us rappel at the same time (aka. simul-rap). Normally (as far as I know) one of the main reasons against simultaneous rappels isn't the strength of the anchors but simply the question "is there space enough for two people to rappel?" There is one wide open rappel in this canyon that we tried it out on - a game of counter-weighting each other and not letting off until both are down. Actually... it was a one-way counterbalance, since we did actually tie a biner block up at the anchor, and just put the heavier person on the fixed side and the lighter on the pull line. It was kinda cool, like all things are for the first time. Not necessarily more efficient or less safe (no extra dynamic forces on the anchor, just two people's weight instead of one).



After the 6 hours doing Bailey we stopped for pizza then went back home, then I immediately proceeded to an hour and a half of tennis with someone else. My feet were pretty much dead at the end of the day and I just yearned to be off of them.

Got some gloves right before I went out for this canyon too, finally. Been thinking for a while it wouldn't make too much more of a difference since I've gone 8 months without and it might even make tying stuff more difficult. Tying stuff was the same as always and rappelling became even easier, much more so than anticipated. Especially when you have to drop into a hang and your hands suddenly take on all the stopping power as no weight is on your legs - definitely makes free hang sections much more comfortable - and controlled. Also very nice coiling a long rope riddled with small rocks, sediment, and other miniscule yet sharp objects. Unfortunately my hands are not beautifully calloused so these help quite a bit.

The main argument against gloves I would say... at least for people new to the sport... you have to know how fast is too fast and that you aren't in an action movie. Gloves actually eliminate the warning signs of touch - like getting rope burn from going too fast. I think it's actually impossible to generate the heat required to actively burn through a rope on rappel (especially rope with a technora sheath), but that isn't to say the sheath wont take some damage from a heated device sitting in one spot, even if its just some charring, or that you won't lose control going too fast. Also if you need to stop on rappel... the faster you're going, the harder you'll stop, and the more force you'll put on the anchor. Again, normally not nearly enough to worry about with a solid anchor, but not good practice in case you ever do rap off a "sketchy" anchor (like another person [meat anchor] or a dead man's anchor).

Back to Bailey for a minute... the last rappel is always kinda cool. It's better when it's at least flowing with a trickle, but yesterday it was pretty much just wet rock, not really any water flowing. The first time I ever rapped down it we had to go through about 20 bees a quarter of the way down, luckily neither of us pissed them off enough. And you always have to make sure you don't impale yourself by sitting on the point of a log that's propped up against the fall. It's a short, easy, and fairly flat hike to get to the bottom of this fall also, and people often take it with their kids and sit down for a snack. It's especially fun rappelling down onto a family with their little kids looking up at you like you're superheroes.


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