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May 04, 2020 — Spencer Canyon was a really pleasant surprise! We were heavily reminded of the Zion National Park area during the duration of this trip: gorgeous monoliths, incredibly slickrock features, and colorful and wide canyon walls. There are apparently two entrances to Spencer Canyon, both requiring at least one rappel. The short route is said to be less pretty and skips most of the technical stuff, so we decided to instead take the longer route. We were not disappointed.
Starting from the end of Spencer Flat Road, we followed a sandy road until we decided we wanted to head through the desert toward Spencer Canyon. There's no one correct route to get to the head of Spencer Canyon, but entering too soon means dealing with some brush. I'd recommend entering around where my "Start of Spencer Canyon" marker is located on the map to get more walking along the rim and less within the brushy canyon. Either way, once in Spencer Canyon, a short rappel leads to an avoidable pool. Following the rappel is a slickrock slope (Class 2+), a scramble into a section of canyon that appeared to be chopped with a cleaver, and then some boulder-hopping to get to a 90 degree turn in the canyon. This 90 degree turn required leaving the watercourse and wrapping around into a narow gully to the left, leading down into a waist-deep pool. Here we came to our second rappel, webbing tied around a massive boulder. The rappel was gorgeous, a narrow and colorful striped slot with a couple of cute potholes easily stepped over. Don't pull your rope yet. At the bottom of our 2nd rapel, the 3rd rappel got us a little concerned. A set of small boulders served as a weight attached to 30+ feet of webbing (the rocks moved upon pulling on the webbing), the webbing's serface area apparently enough to offset our weight. We had enough webbing, but preferred to somewhat irresponsibly trust the webbing already in place (it was looking a little gnarly), meat-anchoring each other. Be ready to do some serious rigging if the webbing doesn't look good to you.
At the bottom of rappel 3, we saw where the nontechnical entrance of Spencer Canyon came in on the right: a brushy and far less interesting looking gully. To the left was the start of the deep and potentially cold narrows. I started shivering just looking into the darkness and was immediately annoyed at myself for choosing to leave my wetsuit in the car in order to suffer in solidarity with my companions who had neglected to purchase wetsuits. Some say they downclimbed this part. I say those people are crazy. It's slick and dark and definitely should be rappelled. Once within the dark narrows, we were able to avoid the first short pool. It looked very deep. The second pool, located 20 feet after the first, was much longer (maybe 50 feet or so) and Matt and Shawn were tall enough to stem the whole way across it without getting wet at all. I, on the other hand, had to stay lower where the canyon was more narrow. Fortuntely, I was able to stay out of the water up to my waist by using a ledge mostly submerged in water. It's a deep pool, likely a swimmer, so be ready to get very wet if you slip. This section is the only reason I'd give this a B rating, even though we were all able to stay basically dry. Another short pool that's much easier to stem over led to the exit of the dark section. The dark narrows lasted far shorter than we thought they would.
Once we emerged into sunlight, Spencer Canyon continued to be gorgeous. There were two avoidable wet sections, only requiring a Class 3 bypass on the left. The walls were narrow and intimidatingly tall. A mile or so through the canyon, we entered a wide area with beautiful monolithic rock buttes that reminded me of Zion's unique features. We hung right and headed south for a short time until we located as escape ridge (Class 3). There may be other ways out of the canyon, but this one worked well and was the most direct option. The aforementioned monoliths behind us piqued Matt and my peakbagger senses immediately and we vowed to come back for them. A slog through the desert led to a sandy wilderness road, which was an uphill sandy mess that I prefer to not remember.
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