It never ceases to amaze me how many wonderful places there are to find and explore in the wilderness. Yesterday was no exception, I hadn't looked up anything or mapped out this trail, but I had explored the Nahahi ridge many times and had the greatest ride of my life coming down it on my mountain unicycle a few years ago. It was way to hot to head up on the ridge, so I decided to go past and see if I could ride some of the Nahahi creek down in the valley, but had never been in that area yet.
So, the trail luckily had a tiny bit of water at the junction of the river I followed out (elbow river) and so I was able to soak my gloves, shirt, head band to stay cool on the ride up the steep creek valley.
About an 30 minutes out and voila, what do I come across, but this AWESOME slot canyon. I figured it would be great to hike up past, finish most of my ride and then come back down and see if I could get though it and hopefully ride through some of it even, since everything was bone dry.
Quite impressive smoothed rock by what obviously flows well other times of the year, but its too dry now, not even a trickle.
It was actually pretty big canyon area, several hundred meters long and most of it, just a few meters wide, pretty typical in this area for these slot canyons to carve out.
So, I got lots of glimpsed of the canyon as I rode higher up the stream from the upper trail.
OK, so when I finished the rest of my ride, ate lunch in the woods and came back down, I knew I had to drop down and see if I could make my way through the canyon. Time to lower the uni and drop in myself.
Times like these I'm glad I have lots of rock climbing experience, just in case I need those skills to get through or find an alternate way out.
Perfect light, shadows, and some decent rideable sections actually. Nothing very long of course, but I can't say I've unied in a slot canyon before! SWEET!
Gotta love all these water carved overhangs.
I actually brought a little micro tripod with me for filming in the woods on this ride and it worked perfect, there were a few little holes in the sides of the walls here and there, and I has able to hang my tripod leg in them to hold a couple wall mounts. I wish I had another camera to take a picture of that setup! Another first!
A few good drops I had to staddle and bridge the sides to get down. Had to just drop the uni down a couple, but it can easily survive that, it's been dropped thousands of times down much worse actually. lol.
Hard to tell scale sometimes, but this is a bent section of canyon in a super wide panorama shot, so you can see the upper and lower bits. Couple of logs thankfully for climbing up and down these sections, they would be much more difficult on just the smooth rock.
Seriously cool and fun place. For a hot day, it was great to drop in this cold canyon since the rock dind't get any sun, it was very cold from over night lows.
So, I hope you liked the photos from my little adventure. As always, I encourage you to click any photos for large views of these, to see the couple movie clips I took here below and to get on out there yourself for a hike, a ride, whatever kind of adventure you can find yourself! Be safe.
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