Lincoln's First Canyon

July 12, 2020


View canyon rating for Rocky Mouth Canyon

I don't even have pictures of us on rappel, but I went canyoneering with one of my boys this afternoon. It was his first real technical canyon and I'm really proud of him.

Sunny selfie on our way up the wooden steps

We also encountered an unexpected difficulty that made the experience less than ideal for my son and I want to talk about that.

Lincoln posing at the waterfall before hiking up and around

The most important thing to remember when taking kids is that it must be done at a relaxed pace. We stopped at every scramble, every bug, cave, bridge, and trickle of water on the way to the top. What would have normally taken ten minutes took thirty.

One of the bigger obstacles to climb for a kid

In order to give Lincoln some responsibility I had him carry his harness, safety tether, helmet, and snacks in his backpack. He is pretty tough and didn't complain about having to carry it. As a matter of fact, he insisted on carrying it the whole time, even on the sketchy dirt slide to get down into the drainage.

All geared up before the technical section

Everything went fine on the approach but two things went "wrong" on the technical part of it that are worth bringing up.

  1. Starting the first rappel, Lincoln had like a 2mm scab on his knee - that he kept picking the week prior - but it got scraped on the rock and made him bleed for a second.
  2. The second problem was on the second rappel there is a place where you have to get into the waterfall a little. I did this and he got splashed and shivered the rest of the way down to the ground.
    I was able to stay out of the water the rest of the descent but it required me to deviate far from the fall line. It was also slippery, we were rappelling tandem, and if I slipped we would have slid a good twenty feet right back into the waterfall.

Afterwards the rappels ate snacks, warmed up in the sun, and then headed home. As I'm writing this trip report he is standing next to me asking to go again so I will conclude that it was a success and we'll probably go again today.

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And we went again! This time he loved it because his brothers were there to watch him do it. His older brother then begged his mom to let him go as well. So older brother went immediately after. Then it started thundering so we headed home.

I added two videos from that second trip to the link with all the images. One video for each of my children who went down the waterfall.


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