Northwest Fork of Three Canyon 04.11.10

I have been wanting to come back to this area ever since the first time we came here with Bill for his birthday a few years ago. I've never been to Three Canyon, but had read about it and it's always been somewhat of a mystery to me and I've wanted to explore it badly.

Alene and I had originally planned to do this trip together, but she had to work a lot of hours preceding this week and was feeling guilty about the time spent away from our daughter Bailey, so she encouraged me to invite my brothers. Jeff was planning on coming until the day before when he cut his hand while doing the dishes. When rappelling is involved, it's hard to do that with a cut hand. Luckily my brother in-law Bill was willing to sacrifice his time and come along with me. Keep in mind that Bill had been back from his trip to California for a total of about 1 hour.

We headed down around 6pm, which meant we would be looking for a campsite in the dark. Bill had the idea to camp at the nearby Chaffin Ranch geyser, which we had heard about but have never seen. Bill had the GPS coordinates, so it wasn't too hard to find in the dark. We set up camp and Bill did some star trails. Eventually we walked over to the geyser and just as we arrived it started to bubble up. The geyser is an old drill hole sight that tapped into a pocket of CO2. There didn't seem to be a method to the timing of it gushing, but we lucked out both at night in the morning of catching it (we also camped about 20' from it so we wouldn't miss it).

Hanging out by the campfire

Bill's star trails and an old chevy (photo Courtesy of Bill)

Night time geyser






Geyser area (the minerals in the water make the area this red color)








Me, standing at the geyser (photo courtesy of Bill)

Messing around one of the old cars (photo courtesy of Bill)

After some pictures and breakfast, we loaded up our stuff into the truck and headed directly for the trailhead for the Northwest Fork of Three Canyon. 

As suggested by all the guidebooks, we first headed over to the exit point and tied a hand line in order to get past a difficult 8' tall section. 

We then headed back along the canyon rim and dropped in.

The beginning of the canyon

Starts to tighten up

The first downclimb

Our second tiny obstacle (a small pothole of water)

Looking down on and prepping for the first big rappel (about 36 feet tall)

Going down

We then went down canyon a bit more to find the bigger (60+ foot) rappel. This one was a bit different because we couldn't see the bottom from where we started, so since it was my birthday, Bill said he would go first again :-). Since we couldn't see the bottom, we couldn't tell if our ropes had hit, so Bill went on a single line and evened them out at the bottom, I went down on the traditional double line.

Looking back on our 2nd rappel

We then headed down canyon and worked our way into Three Canyon

Three Canyon was pretty uneventful due to these TALL grasses that covered the entire canyon floor.

Bill was cursing the grasses and the water he kept accidentally stepping into

We got tired of trudging through these grasses, so after 1/2 a mile or so, we opted to head back and go check out moonshine wash.

A grass-less area of Three Canyon

Going up the exit route

Before heading over to Moonshine wash, we opted to drive down to the drill hole site where Three Canyon meets the Green River at the Trin Alcove bend. We ate lunch and headed out to moonshine wash (I'll do a separate post for that)