Where I almost died

Okay, so I know there are many of you out there that just look at the pictures and do not read the story. Obviously, this one will be a little different as the pictures can not tell the story. It started out as just a beautiful fall day in Zion National Park. I was completely stoked because Seth and I were getting to do a new canyon for the first time. Lodge Canyon starts on the east side of the park, yet finishes right at the RV campground at the Lodge. We knew the beginning portion well enough as it started at the entrance to Spry. We trudged up the mountainous amount of slickrock, finding the highest point easy enough. From there, we tried to interpret our route description, but were unsuccessful, climbing up too much slickrock rather than continuing the descent toward Spry canyon. We figured it out quickly enough and soon were descending into Lodge canyon. I was happy that we had waited until October as the canyon was cool enough to be fun with fall colors even emerging. The canyon stayed non-technical for such a long period of time without even a downclimb that was challenging. Instead, we were surprised to find ourselves popping out above the Lodge with a view down into the Zion Canyon. We decided to have lunch even though it was still just eleven o’clock. We sat right on the edge and really soaked up the view assuming that we had all the time in the world as there were only 6 long rappels to finish up before we would walk out. We took our time with lunch before sauntering over to the first rappel. We were not quite sure how long the first rap was, but we knew it to be longer than 100 feet so we tied our two coiled ropes together and chucked them down. We both looked over the edge to see a blue rope at the bottom and thought, great one of our ropes was down but not the other. I decided to go first and got clipped in with my prussik on the rope. I started on rappel, looked down and sure enough the blue rope was on the ground, but the orange rope was hung up on a ledge about halfway down. I let Seth know that I would be stopping on that ledge to manage ropes. What I didn’t know was that it was not the orange rope I would be managing on the ledge. Instead, I took a look at my blue rope on the ledge and saw, oh no, I only have ten feet of blue rope left! Without a knot in it, if I would have continued ten more feet, I would have rappelled off the end of my rope! That picture above could have been the last picture taken of me as I easily would have fallen a good sixty feet from there. What happened to put me in that position? Looking down from there, I could see a blue rope on the bottom. It seems that somehow, two blue ropes were coiled together to look like one 200 foot rope. In our cache we have one blue 65 ft, one blue 135 ft, and one 200 ft rope. Somehow we had obtained the 65 and the 135 and right now I was trying to do a 130 foot rappel with a 65 ft rope. I would love to say that cooler heads prevailed and we figured out the right fix immediately. It did not happen that way. We thought about ascending back to the top, but after a few minutes of trying to ascend on prussiks to the top of that canyon, I knew we were going to have to come up with a better solution. Luckily, I was on a ledge, though, and together we came up with a plan to fix one line than tie the rope off above creating one fixed line. From there, I was able to descend a single strand, tie the rope at the bottom to the 200 foot orange rope we had and allow Seth too descend on a double strand. It worked beautifully and soon we were committing to a canyon with three oddly sized ropes. I was a little unnerved by the experience, but felt fortunate to walk away in fine shape. We walked over to the next rappel that was the one I was concerned about before the incident above. It was a big awkward sloping monster of a start. Seth went first this time and luckily we had enough rope to not worry here. But still there was an awkward charade of webbing that lead to a daisy chain in, hook in ATC, slowly lower down as far as you could, unhook daisy chain as you hoped the worn tread on your shoes would grip (except for a brief heart stopping slip it did), lower yourself down the rope onto where you were finally on rappel just to avoid a place where ropes would get stuck. The drop was fine and we continued down a couple more easy drops after that. Then we got to the fifth rap. You had to rappel halfway down rap four and get off rappel or else you would have a huge 600 foot rappel. We did that fine. We had to climb across to a small ledge over a precipitous drop. No problem there. But looking at the anchor, it was a two bolt anchor with some webbing hanging over the edge. You were supposed to downclimb that webbing to even get yourself on rappel. To add to it, this rappel was 190 feet and with our ropes, that put us at a disadvantage. After thinking about it, I decided that I would go down first on a single strand from the first two bolt anchor to see how long the rap truly was. Then Seth would re-rig, tying the second rope to it, then downclimbing onto rappel. I definitely left Seth with the more difficult task as I had an easy time single stranding the long drop with a little extra friction from a carabiner. I was also able to see that there would be no issues as a second two bolt anchor was halfway down the drop. Seth with his mad skills, though, was somehow able to take the knot down with him to give him two strands all the way down to where I was standing. Somehow the math was not adding up, so we had to assume that these drop distances were not actually measured. We hoped that the next one would prove to be the same as the last rap was supposed to be 170 feet to the canyon floor. When we threw our two ropes and Seth got on rappel, he looked down and sure enough both ropes were on the ground, though one was hung up in a tree. We fixed that and after the rappel we were done. At 5:00pm! The canyon had taken us 5 hours for 6 rappels. That is not very good time, but frankly, we were happy to be safe with what could have gone on in that canyon that evening, I was happy to back home to my wife and child that evening. The one lesson I learned out of this experience is always put a knot at the end of your rope. It take 15 seconds, but it could save your life. I will make sure to do that in the future!