The Hole Truth
Canyoneering is roping in thousands of new adrenaline addicts, but how safe is it?
By Kelley King Six years ago Bo Beck first stared down Heaps Canyon, the 11-mile sandstone chute that snakes treacherously through Utah’s Zion National Park. Just to get to Heaps’s gaping mouth, he and two buddies had hiked 11 hours, bushwhacking their way through two miles of desert brush. Now they began their plunge into what Beck called “the great unknown.” Some 12 hours later they would stumble back to their base camp, but only after navigating through miles of nearly pitch-black tunnels, swimming across 20-foot bowls of bone- chilling rainwater and rappelling a 540-foot crevasse. “In canyoneering you get the endorphin rush of climbing combined with the fear of the unknown, not to mention the beauty and uniqueness of the rock striations,” says Beck, 45, a volunteer rescuer at Zion. “It’s better than drugs.”
The whole thing:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/siadventure/2/inside_out/