http://climbing.about.com/b/2012/10/08/swimming-and-climbing-through-moabs-watery-canyons.htm
Swimming and Climbing Through Moab’s Watery Canyons By Stewart Green, About.com Guide
Canyoneering, a relatively new sport, is the art of descending narrow canyons cut deeply into rocky mesas and mountains. Canyoneering combines elements of rock climbing, rappelling, bouldering, swimming, wading, and hiking to navigate and explore canyons. As you descend a twisting canyon in the Utah desert, you explore a beautiful world below the arid surface and discover secret grottoes filled with trickling water, ferns, spadefoot toads, and birdsong. Above you loom sandstone soaring walls sculpted over a million years by periodic floods of water.
Last week I was guiding a climbing and canyoneering trip for Front Range Climbing Company in the red rock country surrounding Moab in eastern Utah. We did a couple of the easier canyons in the area–the Medieval Chamber and Entrajo Canyon. Both offer wild adventures, scrambling through narrow slots, rappelling off cliffs, plunging through water-filled potholes, and even swimming in cold water.
Entrajo Canyon, while a short trip, offered the best value with the final hole brimming with brown murky water that was eight-feet deep. Small spadefoot toads, the size of a thumbnail, perched along the rocky edge of the pothole while tadpoles swam the depths and water skippers skimmed the surface.
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