Zach, dlaw, Ionna and I went to Zion in the summer 2018. After doing a lot of beginner "intro to canyoning" trips, it was nice to power through some of the harder canyons in that area. We even ran into Itaru near the end of our trip, and he joined us for our last canyon.

The most memorable canyon was definitely Imlay. The canyon has 40+ obstacles. It was our first time doing pothole escapes, and we weren't planning on taking more than one day (though we were prepared to do an emergency bivvy.)

After a strenuous entrance hike, the first obstacle was the "trash compactor", named after the scene from star wars. After rappelling into deep water in a narrow slot, you are faced with a swim of about 100 feet. The catch is that the path is completely blocked up with floating logs and debris. The logs are too large to just shove out of the way, but not bouyant enough to stand on. The only way to make forward progress is to tread water, while slowly rearranging the logs to make forward progress.

This first obstacle took us 40 minutes, and we were absolutely convinced that we were out of our league. We were mentally preparing to spend the the better half of a week slowly making our way through forty more trash compactors. Thankfully, the rest of the obstacles were much more straightforward. The canyon was fun and challenging, and we made it out before nightfall.

The canyon finishes with a 100' free-hanging rappel into the narrows. There were tourists directly in the fall line of our rope, so we flaked the rope and lowered it down hand-over-hand so as to not drop it on their heads. They didn't even notice that there were people above them until the first person was nearly finished with the rappel.

Video

List of canyons we did:

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