Built To Roam: Ding and Dang Canyoneering

"The entire first mile of the hike followed a dry riverbed, lined with walls made from mudstone marbled with quarts veins (I mean probably, but most of that is just Corey facts, so take it with a grain of salt), framed by mounds of mustard colored hills."
Canyoneering is defined as the sport of exploring canyons, by climbing, repelling, or rafting. It's essentially a parkour-ish version of hiking that takes you down into and through a canyon. It doesn't follow traditional trails, but weaves up, over and through a canyon, taking the same path that the water which formed the canyon took. It is because of this that there are a few inherent dangers to canyoneering including: flash floods, choke stones, large drops, and narrow pathways that you must take in order to make it through to the other side.

Teamwork.

There are few places in the world where you can go Canyoneering. Some of which include Spain, Africa, France, and of course the best place of them all, Utah. Canyoneering routes have their own system of classifications much like a rock climbing route would, and there are technical and nontechnical routes. For this trip we choose a nontechnical route, Ding and Dang Canyons, inside the San Rafael Swell just outside of Capitol Reef National Park.
The San Rafael Swell is well know for it's variety of canyons, from the easy yet spectacular Little Wild Horse Canyon, to more technical options like Moroni Slopes this area has it all. We chose Ding and Dang due to the fact that it was classified as nontechnical, required no equipment, but still had some challenging sections and allowed for a round-trip hike instead of out and back on the same trail, which gave us two distinct canyons to travel through.

Noose not included.

The drive to Ding and Dang took us past Little Wild Horse Canyon before dumping us out onto a dried up river bed, allowing me to test out the off-road capabilities of a Chrysler 200, which surprisingly didn't do all that bad. We parked in an open sandy section a few yards away from the start of the hike, got our bags ready and headed out on the trail.
The entire first mile of the hike followed a dry riverbed, lined with walls made from mudstone marbled with quarts veins (I mean probably, but most of that is just Corey facts, so take it with a grain of salt), framed by mounds of mustard colored hills.

Dried up.

The occasional lizard zig-zagged by and we soon made our way to the fork that separated Ding Canyon from Dang Canyon. It's worth noting at this point, that we chose the easier of the two traverses, Up Ding and down Dang.
Ding started with a narrows section which soon opened up to a pretty wide canyon lined with staggeringly high walls and some cool rock formations that reminded me of my trip to the Needles District. There weren't many challenges other than a bit of scrambling in Ding Canyon and soon we made our way out onto the other side of the Swell. A short westerly hike through the open desert and past Ding Dang Dome took us to the mouth of the more challenging Dang canyon.

Ding Dang Dome, Duh.

Soon after our decent into the Canyon it was clear that this was going to be a bit more challenging that I had first expected. A pair of early drop-offs set the ton for what was to come, and after the first few problems we had gotten used to down climbing a bit, and so of course the canyon shifted difficulties. The last couple of obstacles included chimneying over a section of water and a vertigo inducing down climb over a ledge, all the while with a boy scout troop close on our heels.
We soon completed the problems and started our hike through the river bed back to the car when we were greeted by a somewhat frantic man who was looking for the scout group that had been behind us for the majority of the trip. Without thinking I informed him that they were behind us but had run into a big problem and we hadn't seen them for a wile. His eyes lit up with terror until Patrick explained to him that what I meant by "Problem" was actually lingo for a canyoneering obstacle. A long laugh and about 20 minutes of ridicule and we had made it back to the car.

Chimneying Kendrick.

On our way to the campsite we stopped briefly at Goblin Valley State Park, which may sound familiar to you from a recent overweight Boy Scout troops' visit there that ended in toppling over some 200 million year old rock formations and criminal charges.
I had been dying to go canyoneering since my first trip to Utah and this hike filled my need, well at least for another couple of months until I inevitably buy plane tickets back out here to do it again. Cheers!

Mileage: 6.5 Miles