Granary Canyon – Moab!

We had a great time in Granary Canyon today. Just two of us today for a late Winter descent (ha ha, as if March is still Winter in Moab.) First time doing a real canyon with B.S.- his initials should have warned me off!

We woke up at 6:30 in Moab and hit the road at 7:10, driving up the always lovely Potash Road all the way down to Jug Handle Arch where we spotted a car before heading up the 4×4 road to the top. The road is no big deal for most of the way, but when you get within 200-300 vertical feet of the rim, it gets a lot more interesting. I still made it in my Sequoia (although I did get nervous at one point and put it in 4 wheel drive.) You don’t quite need a rockcrawler jeep, but I don’t think I’d take a Subaru or anything without 4WD. After 6 miles we made it to where we thought we were supposed to be. We didn’t see any drill pads or drill holes or anything described in the beta except the mileage. Didn’t really matter. As long as you leave the road and head in the right direction, you’ll hit the canyon eventually within a couple of minutes. We were dropped off at 8 am and it was 34 degrees but promising to warm up quickly.

Once in Upper Granary there are no navigation issues until you finish Upper Granary. However, what we did find was way more rappels than we were expecting. Maybe I didn’t read the beta from Road Trip Ryan very carefully, but my impression from it was that there were only something like 4 rappels in this entire canyon. By the time we finished Upper Granary, we had already rappelled 8 times, although one of those was a meat rappel followed by a capture. The topo describes being able to skip a lot of those rappels. That is true. But only because you can climb out of the canyon all over the place and climb back into it in other places. If you wanted, you could just walk next to the canyon for a mile or two. That seems kind of silly to me. I mean, we came to Canyoneer, not Rimaneer. We stayed in the water course, and if we did it again, we would rappel 7 times in Upper Granary. Upper Granary took us an hour and a half.

Here’s a key piece of navigation. Because there are dozens of places you can climb out of Upper Granary, it is not entirely clear the first time you descend it where Upper Granary ends. If you stay in the watercourse, you will cross a wide area where you will be very sure you are done with Upper Granary. Then you will come to a large drop with no rope grooves. That’s because you blew the navigation. You see, despite the fact that this is all called “Granary Canyon” it is two almost completely separate canyons. You see, Upper Granary Canyon runs into a crossjoint that eventually flows into Lower Granary Canyon. That crossjoint can be descended, as can 4 or 5 more crossjoints (at least one of which had sling on a tree at the top of it) between that crossjoint and the actual head of Lower Granary canyon, which is now behind you and halfway over to Long Canyon. If the description doesn’t match (i.e. that you can see a bunch of potholes) you’re not in the right place. However, if you would like to go slacklining, that first crossjoint in the watercourse is a particularly spectacular place to do it- 4 new bolts sunk into each side of the crossjoint, about 60 feet apart. You could rappel off any of them, of course, but then you’d miss the best part of the whole day.

Once you’re at the head of Lower Granary, you will be super excited to descend because it looks awesome. That’s because it is awesome. So if what you’re looking at going down doesn’t look awesome, you’re in the wrong place. The next couple hundred yards, from the rim to the end of the Onion, are the best part of the whole canyon. At any rate, this is a nice scenic spot to take a break. By the time we left here, we were 2:15 into our day. We rappelled 5 times in Lower Granary. You didn’t have to have a Fiddlestick for any of the drops, but we used it on all of them and in several places in Upper Granary. If you have one and are proficient in its use, bring it- you’ll save a lot of rope grooves. I assume the trip reports talking about Omnislings are from people who don’t know how to use a fiddlestick. You don’t need anything to descend this canyon but a Fiddlestick and perhaps some sling (long, long slings) if you need to replace any. But you probably won’t have to replace much, because most of the sling in the canyon is unnecessary if you have a Fiddlestick.

There were a few puddles of water, but it was pretty simple to keep your feet dry around all of them. Definitely a 3A canyon. I think we had a total of 6 or 8 feet of wet rope. Take your hiking shoes, not your canyon boots. You’ll be glad you did.

When you finish Lower Granary (which we did about 11:30- 3 1/2 hours into the canyon), the hike begins. This section would really, really stink if you were here in July and moving slowly. It would be very, very hot. We were headed for the huge pourover. Which is really huge. Maybe 600-700 feet. There was a fixed rope from a ledge halfway down on the RDC side. Not sure whose epic that was from. At any rate, you won’t miss the pourover. Traveling from the pourover to Jug Handle Arch is relatively simple, but finding the final rappel is not as simple. The final wall is 600 feet tall, way more than 197 feet. It is patently obvious that you are not going to reach the ground from just about anywhere but if you find the right tree (it is between Jug Handle Arch and Longs Canyon, not the far side of the Arch) there will probably be sling on it and you’ll see some mild rope grooving. The reason there will probably be sling on it is that if you tried to Fiddle Stick it with a 60 m rope you wouldn’t get to the ground. You need the slings to get over the edge to make the ground. It really is 197 feet and you cannot see the bottom from the top, but you can see minor rope grooves in 3 places from the rim. We hit the ground at 1230, 4 1/2 hours after starting and 6 hours after waking up. The stroll to the car is simple and by 1:00 we were eating lunch back in Moab. A beautiful canyon on a beautiful day.