Ouray home to burgeoning canyoneering scene The remote canyons around Ouray draw an elite cadre of explorers POSTED: 09/18/2012 By Matt Minich Special to The Denver Post
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OURAY — For a man dangling above 170 feet of open air, Greg Foy was composed. Leaning out over the cliff’s edge, he checked his climbing harness and tugged the rope and anchor securing him to the canyon walls. Then he stepped back, leaving the safety of the ledge and entering the vertical world of one of Colorado’s wildest waterfalls. I stood at the base of the falls, water still streaming from my shoes and wetsuit, and watched him descend. A black dot against the rocks, his body disappeared halfway down the face into the torrent of water. Moments later, he plopped into an ankle-deep pool.
Foy unclipped from his rope and pulled it through the anchor above. “You’ve joined an elite group,” he said with a grin.
Cory Jackson rappels next to a waterfall as Greg Foy provides a fireman’s belay in Lower Oak Creek outside Ouray. (Photos by Samuel Wilson, Special to The Denver Post)
“Very few people have seen what you’re seeing now.”
We stood together in Lower Oak Creek, one of the lesser-known technical canyons of the San Juan Mountains. Though the entire length of the canyon is less than a mile from the southwest Colorado town of Ouray, steep rock walls and the surrounding mountainsides render it invisible to anyone not actually inside.
Foy believes the bottom of Lower Oak has been seen by fewer than 200 people.
Through the annual Ouray Canyon Festival — which he organizes with the help of his wife, Connie — Foy hopes to bring these canyons out of obscurity and into the forefront of the sport.
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