Rachel Grindlay

Continued from Part 5

We briefly stopped in at Lone Rock – in Lake Powell – before retracing our drive up and out of Page from a couple of days earlier. I can’t remember what letter of the alphabet the music was up to but it wasn’t enough to keep Tom alert and I got to take over driving duties much earlier than I expected.

That meant Tom was on accommodation booking and we ended up at a Motel 6 for a bargain basement price of US$50 for the night (the nearest camping was close to US$40). Tom did warn me it was close to the Interstate but as we drove in I thought it didn’t seem too bad. Except we soon discovered our room, understandably at the price, was round the back of the complex, with nothing but a couple of hundred metres separating us from the traffic. Neither of us slept particularly well, and so when the alarm went off pretty early, there was a brief conversation about ditching our ambitious plan for the day. But, with the amount of traffic noise, I figured we weren’t going back to sleep, so we may as well get up and go.

We headed to Illusions Canyon, a tributary of the West Fork of Oak Creek. We had finished our last US trip in Sedona and driven past this area. On that trip, we hadn’t given any thought to hiking Oak Creek – even though it’s apparently one of the most popular trails in the area – and definitely had no thoughts of canyons in the area.

Illusions is considered one of the best canyons in Arizona, by many people on the interwebs, and had come highly recommended to us by a friend. But it also comes with a myriad of warnings about a possible keeper pothole at the very end. In easy mode it’s simply a pool which you swim across after the last abseil, but in hard mode it’s a 19 foot deep pothole that many of the usual pothole escape methods don’t work on. We don’t have much (any) need for pothole escapes in Blue Mountains canyons and so we don’t own pothole escape tools, let alone have the experience for a challenging escape (I have stood on Tom’s head once to get out of an easy-ish pothole…). So there was no way we were going to attempt this canyon if we thought there was even a chance it wasn’t in easy mode. The Arizona Canyoneering Facebook group and conditions reports on RopeWiki assured me it had been in easy mode the week before.

The other big decision was whether to do the traditional approach and exit, which involved hiking up the AB Young Trail – a 500m ascent, and then descending the West Fork of Oak Creek at the end. The alternative is a much shorter ‘sneak’ approach which involves about an hour of driving on forest roads to get to the top.

Given my well-known love of dirt roads, we (I) figured we’d rather ascend 500m on foot! Plus West Fork of Oak Creek is supposed to be a worthwhile objective in its own right. With the decision made, an early start was definitely in order, which is why we were at the trailhead not long after 7am. The hike up AB Young wasn’t too bad, as it is a series of many (33) switchbacks and we were early enough that the temperature was quite pleasant.

From the top we took a somewhat circuitous route on the plateau to the Illusions drainage. If we were to ever do it again (unlikely – because we live in Australia, and we’d likely do the sneak route) we’d probably contour across the plateau to save some walking. I hadn’t packed the compass which I was somewhat regretting as we were trying to follow the instructions to get in. We had various electronic navigation devices, but nothing beats having a compass when you’re just trying to head in a particular direction.

We found ourselves in the drainage and got our first introduction to Arizona bushwhacking. I’d heard enough about it from friends, but you never know what other people’s scrub thresholds are. And as it was neighbouring largely vegetation-free Utah I had thought the scrub might be over-hyped. I like to think my scrub threshold is pretty high – but being surrounded by unfamiliar plants made it a lot more challenging. Turns out lots of the Arizona plants were spikey – like blackberry spikey. I was also a bit surprised that for what I thought was a pretty popular canyon there didn’t seem to be much of a route. We likely dropped in slightly early and we did find ourselves on a social trail after a few minutes.

The vegetation didn’t really ease off, but at least I started to work out which plants really needed to be avoided! Eventually we got to the sign warning us of all the dangers of canyoneering and soon after that the creek turned into a canyon – one that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Blue Mountains.

The upper section very much could have been the Blue Mountains but soon we got to features and downclimbs that were not at all Blue Mountains-esque. Twisting corkscrew downclimbs, climbing through arches, abseiling through arches all wonderful features of this canyon.

Besides the pothole, our main concern with this canyon was the temperature. We only own 3mm and 3/4mm wetsuits – which seemed to be on the light end of what was ever recommended at any time of year. We were hoping with it being autumn that we’d get through ok. By the time we got three-quarters of the way through we were definitely feeling the cold. We got to a drop which our beta said was a downclimb, but Tom didn’t like the look of it. As were both shivering we just needed to make a quick decision. I meat-anchored Tom down and then he partner-assisted me. While we could see where a skilled person could downclimb it was above our comfort level that day.

We were glad to get to the final section of narrows as it promised warmth wasn’t too far away. Other trip reports I’d read had made me think the final narrows were going to be a bit longer – but the two raps were right on top of each other and with only the two of us we made pretty quick work of them. Tom was wondering whether to prepare for needing to escape the final pothole – but I was like “just assume it’s going to be a swim and get on with it!” Fortunately that was the case and it was just a swim across the pothole.

After Tom hauled me out I got to have a look at the pothole. It is amazing what difficulties can be hidden! It was such a nondescript pool. It made me wonder how many Blue Mountains canyons hide similar problems – but the pools just never empty so we don’t have to deal with them.

I assured Tom I’d read two trips reports that said there was another abseil further down the creek. We were cold enough (and weary of the vegetation) that we left our wetsuits on. After quite a way he was definitely sceptical that the abseil existed. But we did eventually hit the final rappel. From there it wasn’t far to the West Fork of Oak Creek proper. Time for a late lunch!

From there Tom had suggested it was only 3km or so to the car park so I was expecting an hour at most. We started bumping into people once there was a track (rather than wading) and a couple of ladies asked how far it was back – of course we hadn’t done it but I suggested 2 miles, and they said ‘no way, we’ve walked way more than that’. Tom… what haven’t you told me?

Once we’d walked the trail of indeterminate length (3km / 3 miles / who knows?), at least one of us needed to retrieve the car from the car park 3km down the road. Tom had unfortunately rolled his ankle as we had been descending the tributary. He suggested I should push on quickly and then go retrieve the car. So I set off at a brisk pace, with my very heavy pack (I had the wet 60m rope in addition to all my wet personal gear). The trail was lovely but it did take a lot longer than I had been expecting.

Once at the Call of the Canyon car park I “just” had to get back to the Bootleggers Picnic Area where we’d left our car in the morning. Before we’d separated Tom had tried to point out some tracks that ran parallel to the road on OpenStreetMap, but I hadn’t thought walking along the road had looked too bad. Not sure which section of road I’d been looking at to think it wasn’t too bad!

There was basically no shoulder for lots of it, so my early technique was to jog the bits with no shoulder, walk the sections which did. I got lucky early on that the breaks in traffic coincided with my no shoulder sections. However 2km down I hit a section with much longer no shoulder sections, and a lot more cars. Eventually I gave up on that and was, fortunately, past the private properties, so I cut down to the creek and picked up the track on the other side. Eventually I was back at the bottom of the AB Young trail and could clamber back to our car – 5:30pm, only 10 hours after we’d left it. The walk along the road was the scariest part of the day – in retrospect I should have tried to get someone leaving the car park to give me a lift down the road.

Luckily the lady on the car park booth didn’t make me pay to stop and pick up Tom, and so we were soon on our way back to Flagstaff. I was feeling pretty smug as I’d decided we needed to book accommodation the night before as I had an inkling it would be a long day. We’d largely avoided being in towns on Friday & Saturday nights – but there was no avoiding this. The whole area is a popular spot to visit and the change in price for the weekends was significant. The basic room we’d had at Motel 6 the night before for $50 on a Thursday night was $180 on Friday night. Needless to say we didn’t head back to Motel 6. I’d found us a lovely Air BnB for the weekend, and we were delighted to have a well-appointed kitchen and the opportunity to eat some fresh produce (and no traffic noise).

Two of the three previous days had been up there with the hardest on the trip, and we had been on the go for almost three weeks. We were both ready for a day off, and what better location than Flagstaff. At 2,100m it was sort of escaping the heatwave. Our sole excursion for the day was to a bakery/café, where I got a surprisingly good coffee (US trips are generally coffee free for me). Otherwise we read, rested and ate good food.

The next morning we were refreshed and ready to go again. Arizona canyons have a short season as most of them are fed by snow melt, so by the time autumn rolls round there’s little to no flowing water. Christopher Creek was the main suggestion from the locals for the time of year, unless we wanted to find ourselves in stagnant disgusting water. So, Christopher Creek was our next stop.

After securing a campsite we drove a short way down the interstate and strolled the 15 minutes in to the creek. Christopher Creek is a more open creek, rather than slot canyon, the main attraction is jumps. I’m not really a jumper unless I have to, but even if I was, I don’t think the water levels were high enough to do much jumping.

We did quite a lot of swimming though and sadly my camera didn’t survive. Well, the camera survived, but the screen did not and as there is no view finder I was taking photos in the dark so to speak.

We encountered a couple of climbers part way down. And then a whole lot of climbing hardware – via ferrata style lines set up so they could get upstream to climbs avoiding the canyon, and many bolted routes.

Sadly we didn’t take lunch in as the exit point would have been a great place to eat it.

Back at camp we enjoyed the pleasant conditions in the shady campsite, particularly knowing this was the last time we were likely to be cool for a while!

Continued in Part 7