Voodoo Oops

We decided to spend the day before father’s day going through a canyon. Since the forest service just reopened the Secret Mountain wilderness back up after the recent slide fire, we picked Voodoo canyon as our destination. This would also allow us to see a little bit of the fire damage near the tops of Illusions and Insomnia canyons.

I got my new shoes and thought I would give them a try. But more on this later….

The day started out in the typical fashion with lots of smiles and high expectations.

However, it didn’t take long before we were climbing up, over, through, and under log debris.

We read about the difficulties on the exit hike of this canyon, but other than the approach being downhill it was just as thick. We decided on Voodoo as opposed to it’s sister canyon Sunburst with the thought that if we were to ever return at least we could look forward to doing the shorter of the two the second time around. Voodoo requires an addition climb over a ridge and down the other side. Here in this picture we have reached the top of voodoo.

Don’t get me wrong. The secret mountain area is gorgeous and despite the dry conditions there is still plenty of greenery.

Once the canyon starts to drop the “real” fun begins. first with some easy down climbs.

Then some trickier ones that involved the questionable branches, logs, and debris. Will it support my weight? Is the bark going to slide off? Is there ground beneath these leaves and pine needles?

There was very little water in this canyon. Here is a nice two stage rappel than ends in a waist deep pool.

The game of the day though is “keep your feet dry”. Here is Kelli being unsuccessful at her attempt.

If it wasn’t for the beautiful (but way too short) section of canyon, I am not sure many people would venture here.

Some more fun and games. Even though this semi keeper is dry we called it the Hornet’s Pit for obvious reasons.

So we decided it was in our best interest to stem over it.

For this rappel the huge boulder that was rigged with 100+ft of webbing was a good 30ft from the lip. So I built a deadman with the abundance of rocks much closer to the lip. Jill was first and her expression look skeptical so I also gave it a meat anchor back-up. The anchor held (even me) and the pull was easy.

I think these are toadstools, but whatever kind of mushrooms they are they were huge.

And these ferns growing out of the rocks were amazing.

Right before we reached the confluence with Secret Canyon there are some short subway like sections.

And then before we knew it we were in Secret Canyon 5 hours later.

The exit drainage was not hard to spot and even came equipped with a cairn.

Then it was back to the grind of pushing through, under, over, around more debris.

We let our guards down when we hit the exit drainage and was just concentrating on avoiding the debris. However, I noticed we were heading North for too long when we should have been heading East. Plus there were a few up-climbs that had me questioning why Todd would not have mentioned it in his book since he had mentioned other much easier obstacles.

So we stopped, surveyed the maps, read the beta and decided we missed a second side drainage that would have turned us to the East. So we back tracked and found what looked to be the correct drainage. It started out benign enough, but then it got steeper, and looser near the top. We got to the top and of course the view was NOT what we were expecting to see. Down the back side was even steeper. And we were not sure what drainage this descended into? I was fairly certain if we could get down this slope and into the drainage we could follow it up and back to the car. However, this was the point we decided to pull out the GPS and double check our assumptions…since we know what assumptions do to you.

We safely (luckily as I was hit in my side by a boulder that was knocked loose) made it down and headed up the draw and as expected back to our car. We did keep the GPS out at this point just to double check everything every couple hundred meters. lol
In this map the red is the track we were supposed to take. The blue is what I believe we took instead, making the exit much harder than it needed to be.

It was a long day and even though my partners are not ready for a run through Sunburst, I would go back tomorrow. If for no other reason then to figure out how I missed the proper drainage.

-Mike