Chavez Canyon

Left unsupervised, I will hike slot canyons. Here's another.

With no rain in the forecast for the day, I drove up to good old Forest Road 151 up near Abiquiu to explore Chavez canyon. This one has been on my radar for a couple of years, but the first time we were in the area, it had just rained hard and the access road was super slippery deep clay gumbo mud, and the second time we thought about doing it, we woke up to snow at our campsite. So, third time's the charm!

A very promising start.

There was a bit of mud here and there due to last week's rain, and on my way into the canyon I spotted an impressively large print -- a bit bigger than the palm of my hand, maybe 4" long. Seems to big to be coyote; I want to believe it is one of the gray wolves that have been starting to work their way north across the state. Needless to say, I was then paying close attention to potential wildlife as well as watching the weather!

The canyon pretty quickly turned interesting. I found myself scrambling and climbing and stemming to avoid mud pits.

While I could have climbed this one, the log was sort of in the way and it turned out to not be quite as solidly lodged as one would hope. I have a policy of not climbing up things I'm not sure I can get back down, so at this point I embarked on a scramble up the scree slope on the side of the canyon and then back down to get around the obstacle, and was happily rewarded with more slots to explore.

Some of the rocks up here have started to erode in the "brains" pattern that we saw last April in Utah.

A second, rather stout scramble broght me to the next section, and more rock fun. Eventually I hit another dryfall. Not climbing this one, and it was about the time that I had designated as my turnaround time based on the weather forecast, so I headed back down. On looking at Google Earth later, it seems that I got to all the good stuff, so that was a good stopping place anyway.

On the way down, I found better scrambing routes, and also took the time to enjoy the views :) It's always fun to see how far one has come up; the truck is parked down in the river valley you can see at teh bottom.