Disappointment Canyon

The leaden sky was spitting snow, I had hiked a mile or so over snot-slick moss, rocks and logs, my coccyx was sore, and I was ledged out well short of my destination.

Back in the summer I had read in Tim Ernst’s blog about the slot canyon on Shop Creek upstream of the famous Twin Falls in the Buffalo National River area, and I put it in my mental file of places to go. I spent the day Saturday cleaning up ice storm damage at our summer home near Fayetteville and planned to get up early Sunday and do some waterfall hunting before heading back to Little Rock. Ernst hadn’t given the location of the slot canyon on his Web site but a little Internet sleuthing turned up this blog, which described how to get there. Thanks, Derek. It turns out you just go to Twin Falls, which is easy to get to, and then continue upstream. Derek has some good photos of the slot canyon and Tim Ernst has his usual stellar photos of the place. Both Tim and Derek wrote about the difficulty of accessing the canyon. Both of them even recommended rock climbing gear, and, in fact, Ernst wrote about using a harness to hang out over the creek to get his pictures. But I figured I could get in there a little ways at least. I was wrong.

I made it to the falls and they were spectacular, but I had seen many pictures of them and knew what to expect. I stopped for a minute and then booked it on around and began the shin-busting hike up the creek bed. There’s a great trail to the falls, but up above didn’t appear to be heavily traveled.

I had checked the weather when the alarm went off at 5 a.m. and was surprised to find the temp in the lower 30s with an expected high of 40. For some reason I was expecting the mercury to climb to 50, so I didn’t really pack for the cold. I stopped at Wal-Mart in Springdale to get some long john pants, but they were sold out. One of the associates said most people were buying thermal pajama bottoms instead, so that’s what I got. It was foggy and overcast, good waterfall shooting conditions. In the higher elevations the fog had frozen on the trees.

Above the waterfall I found myself in a real canyon, no way to climb out, and the stream bed was choked with debris from the recent Epic Ice Storm of 2009. It was so cold I didn’t even want to unlimber my camera gear to shoot some of the scenic little cascades. I just wanted to get to the slot canyon and worry about taking pictures on my way back. It’s a beautiful place. Just about everything is covered in soft green moss. One little slope was strewn with small boulders all fuzzed over. It looked like a scene out of the Lord Of The Rings. In some places there were runs of unobstructed limestone that offered easy walking except it was covered in that fine limestone dust that gets extremely slippery when wet. You could use that stuff as some kind of industrial strength lubricant, I bet.

I was about halfway there when I tried walking along a huge downed tree. The bark was rotting and slick so I though better about continuing that route. I squatted down and let my feet slip off the log to the ground and in the process banged my tailbone on the log. My butt only dropped about two inches, but it must have hit just the right spot because I almost went down to my knees from the pain. (It still hurts as I write this 15 hours later.)

Eventually I got to where I could catch little glimpses of water jumping over rocks ahead, but it was troubling because they looked to be much higher up than I was. And then I was there, the bottom of the slot. But the walls were so close and steep, I couldn’t go any farther without wading in the creek. The bottom of the slot looked like the end of one of those big water slides at a water park. The flow came twisting out of nowhere and ended in a long pool. I couldn’t even see upstream past the first curve. I stood there for 30 minutes trying to figure out a way to go farther along, but the sides where too steep and I didn’t want to get wet or risk my camera gear. From where I was I couldn’t even get a decent shot of the outlet of the slot.

So I headed back down. On the way back I stopped in a few places for some pictures, but I passed several nice spots by because I just didn’t want to fool with getting the camera out of the backpack and setting up the tripod. I just wanted to get in the truck and turn the heat on. I know, I’m a wuss.

When I got back to the falls, I saw why all photos of Twin Falls look the same. There are just a couple of places from which to get an unobstructed shot. So I got the cliche shot and headed home.