Be sure to watch in 1080p!
Upper Blackbox is a fun river hike if you like walking through moving water, mud, and tripping over rocks that are hidden just beneath the murky water. We did the (Short Route) which involves a 120ft rappel. There is also the option to do a 220ft rappel into the canyon, but that involves carrying a longer rope. You can do this canyon without rappelling by doing the canyon in reverse from what we did by starting at the exit and hiking up river as far as you want then turning around and going back down river. There was a guy doing that with a boogie board to help him cruise through the water instead of floating and swimming like we did. There is also the “Preferred Route” which is an additional 2-4 hours and has one 85ft rappel. There is yet another route called the “Long Route” and is an additional 2 hours on top of the Preferred Route time. Upper Blackbox is worth doing to check it off the list, but I don’t see myself doing it again anytime soon. I would rather do Black Hole of White Canyon in Cedar Mesa any day! It was pretty cool to jump off those logs into the river though! that was about 8ft deep.
I shot this video with my GoPro HERO3 Black Edition camera at 1080p at 30fps and edited with iMovie. I had my GoPro mounted to my GoScope Extreme which is a telescoping pole and it works great with the J-Hook mount! Get your GoScope at http://go-scope.com.
Sandstone Addiction
Here’s a pic of the anchor–taken in June 2012.
From below on rappel.
There was also some webbing around some chockstones in the waterway and have heard reports of more bolts higher up, with a much longer rap, eliminating the very mildly exposed downclimb to get to these.
We chatted with some guys from Price that said that they normally downclimb the waterway. Penalty points too high for me though.
Jman
Yea, definitely wouldn’t want down climb it. Your head would end up like a cracked egg if you slipped. (a 40ft exposed fall, something like that?)
But from where Sandstone has his pic is where Shane listed the optional rappel too. It’s actually a really a cool rap going into the noisy gorge below.
-Brett
Ram
Nice. the entry rap was once taunted by Kelsey as a downclimb. Pretty stiff i remember. Loose 5th class. What is the anchor up there? nice quicksand!!! I did this route twice in the 1980’s. I remember tripping over rocks in shallow brown water and having horrifically dry skin after the day