On our recent Utah roadtrip, we took the boys up a portion of three separate slot canyons: Fry (Frylette), Leprechaun, and Little Wild Horse. (I’m just getting around to putting up some details about the activities from that trip). The boys were ecstatic about the actual canyon bits, and grumbly about the hiking. On reflection: typically like I feel as well, when I’m doing full-on adult canyoneering trips… hopefully however I suppress the whining a bit better than the children (one small example of how parenting can motivate you to be a better person).
My boys are still pretty young for canyoneering—two, five, and six years old. To be accurate we didn’t really go canyoneering with the kids, we hiked up into some of the slot canyons in which one can canyoneer. We can’t even expect Emerson to walk very far by himself yet (so I still take the carrier as my pack). However, with a judicious choice of canyons and low expectations of how far we would go, it worked out great.
First, for those who don’t know, canyoneering is essentially hiking down a canyon, but a canyon with steep walls so that you can’t escape whenever you want. If it thunderstorms up-stream, the canyon can flash flood and kill you. This is extremely rare, but ups the adventure factor considerably. Technical canyons may require ropes, rappels, and advanced rock climbing skills, and involve swims through frigid water, wetsuits, dead decaying floating animals, nasty water, “keeper” potholes that can be difficult to escape, narrows so impassibly tight that one needs to stem several feet high above the bottom (meaning hands and feet on the walls, spread eagle over the trail). The best slots have challenges that require serious skills, gear, and careful thought to successfully traverse. Many of them have incredibly beautiful winding narrows with high vertical walls of red sandstone. The most basic “slot” canyon has at least some portion of “narrows”, where the walls come in tight and tall.
I have been through Fry a half-dozen times, Leprechaun three, and Little Wild Horse once before. So I already knew that my plan for the family was a safe one. For each canyon, we did an out-and-back rather than a loop. We hiked up into the end of the canyon from the exit, rather than descending it from the top, and went as far as good solid parental prudence dictated before turning around and returning by the same route we had hiked in. The trick of course is to push the kids hard enough to reach some good canyon sections and to make it a worthwhile, rewarding experience, but not so hard that they suffer meltdowns on the hike out and have to be physically dragged back to the car. Doing the out-and-back is a way of mitigating the meltdown risk; you know exactly what you’re in for on the way out.
Fry Canyon
Fry canyon is a perfect introduction to slots (this link is the beta that we used twenty years ago—still fantastic today—Tom is the Man). It actually passes under the highway, so the approach doesn’t get any shorter. You pull off the road and park, walk one minute down to the entrance, mess around in the narrow slot until it opens back up to wide sandy canyon (which happens directly under the highway bridge), then return the way you came. There is usually enough water in it to get fully wet and cold, which is a key element of true canyoneering and far more exciting for the kids. It is super short, almost disappointingly so. Adults might find it underwhelming—in which case you can hike the full canyon (see below). Even as a full family, with me carrying the kids across the single cold pothole one-by-one (both on the way out and the return), it only took us about an hour, car-to-car, taking our time and stretching it out, messing around as much as possible. If it’s really wet, there are short full swims, so you’ll want to go first and assess how doable it is for the kids (my kids can’t swim yet). On this trip we had just one chest-deep pothole and then plenty of slippery mud and puddles. When I first did it in 2001 it was considerably more wet (and we were considerably more young).
(NOTE: I have described the so-called “Frylette”, not the full Fry Canyon hike that is described elsewhere. For those adults that are adventuring without kids, you can go for the full canyon, which will net you some Indian Ruins (if you can climb and bring the gear for it) and a single nice rappel.
LINK to Road Trip Ryan’s Fry Canyon beta
Get Directions
here are some pics from WAY back in the day—this trip was with Gary, Scott, and Jon I believe—I distinctly remember the hours spend on the trundling project…
Leprechaun Canyon
Leprechaun canyon (particularly the Main Fork–beta at this link) is a wonderful canyon with lots of tight narrows and strenuous downclimbing. It is a challenging canyon and is not suitable for young kids. Having done it a few times before, I knew that the exit of the canyon has beautiful, tall narrows, and that it wasn’t too far away from the road at the bottom. So we hiked up from the bottom, managing to experience just a tiny bit of the very end of the canyon. The boys loved it. We went up into a super narrow quite dark section. I think this is the one that got them hooked on cayoneering as an activity, owing to the dark narrows.
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Little Wild Horse
Little Wild Horse is a proper beginner canyon, and should be allotted a full day. No rappels, no swimming, no scrambling, not technical whatsoever, it’s a great big loop that is accessible to nearly everyone. We hiked it as an out-and-back and didn’t do the full loop that one could do with a stronger party. The first 30 minutes is a hot hike up a sandy streambed, before it slots up. The slot becomes progressively more interesting, and may have some shallow puddles to wade through. This had more length and substance, canyon-wise, than the Leprechaun foray, but still didn’t get to the super narrow, super dark character that Leprechaun had. Though our experiences with both canyons were sort of similar, in terms of hiking up from the bottom, getting into some interesting stuff, then turning around after a few hours at most.
Most of the map below is a track of the road. There is no camping at the trailhead–this may be the busiest slot canyon in utah. The two short forays visible on the map that were south of the road lead to perfectly acceptable spots—except that when we were there the wind was bad and it was like being in a sandstorm. Impressively desolate, dry, desert dirt spots. We finally found a more protected spot farther to the north–that’s the waypoint on the map with the tent icon. The boys loved that spot, as there were two sandy slopes that they climbed and plummeted their bodies down with great fervor. Somewhere I have a video of them dancing on an outcropping–let me see if I can load that one up.
If we ever return, we’ll either use this same campsite or else drive around to the west of the swell (this was the original advice of a friend father family canyoneering extraordinaire, Mike Pirozzi, that I should have heeded. I thought that driving to the west side just for camping would be excessive, but we ended up spending more time wandering around looking for a non-windy spot on the east-side than we would have if we had just followed the good advice initially…).
Get Directions
So, how to summarize? Our first outing with the kids up the bottom of some slot canyons was a total success. We managed the complaining successfully, such that the fun factor outweighed the whining factor. It is a totally doable thing, to take your kids out to experience some legitimate slot canyons–in a carefully controlled way. Go do it. Let me know about it. And then we can go do more adventures together, your family and mine.
GPS downloads:
Fry Canyon:
20180714_FryCanyon.kml
20180714_FryCanyon.gpx
Leprechaun Canyon:
20180714_LeprechaunCanyon.kml
20180714_LeprechaunCanyon.gpx
Little Wild Horse Canyon:
20180714_LittleWildHorse.kml
20180714_LittleWildHorse.gpx
