Angels Landing and Behunin Canyon
Elevation gain: ~3200 ft
Canyon rating: 3BIII (intermediate difficulty with some water)
Time: 15 hours
Alex, Tyler, and I went on a canyoneering trip in Zion National Park. Alex had been canyoneering before, while Tyler and I hadn’t, but we are all experienced rock climbers comfortable setting up anchors and rappels.
Preparation
We started out on the morning of November 7, 2022. Behunin is normally known for being a dry canyon, but there had been some precipitation lately. The rangers that we talked to said it was definitely possible that there would be wet sections, so we stopped at a gear shop to rent some dry bibs and canyoneering boots.
Additionally, we originally planned to do the canyon a few days earlier, but rearranged the trip due to bad weather. What we hadn’t planned for is that Daylight Savings had just ended, which meant the gear shop and park shuttles were opening an hour later than they were the day before. The unplanned stop at the gear shop had us getting on the Zion shuttle around 9am, which is definitely later than we had wanted.
Angels Landing (9:30am - noon)
The approach to Behunin Canyon goes right past Angels Landing. Since it was my first time in Zion, I wanted to take a detour to see it. We luckily won the day-before lottery for a permit.
We started hiking around 9:30am and went up the famous Walter’s Wiggles trail. We reached the top of Angels Landing about two hours later.
It’s a beautiful view, but to be honest, I’m not sure that it’s worth the hype and crowds, since you could get a similar view in other places. After (quickly) taking in the view and taking some pictures, we descended back down.
Behunin Canyon
Approach (noon - 3pm)
Next we continued on the approach to the canyon. Routefinding was a bit tricky as the trail was not well-defined in some places, and there was a decent amount of bushwhacking and walking through puddles. I definitely questioned if we were going the right way a few times.
The approach took us longer than we thought it would. We reached the top of the first rappel around 3pm. We discussed turning around and bailing at this point due to the time, but decided to go onwards, accepting the risk that we were going to get out of the canyon late.
Rappels 1-2 (3pm - 4pm)
The first 2 rappels were pretty straightforward. I liked the curving, layered canyon walls around us.
Rappels 3-4 (4pm - 5:30pm)
These 2 rappels were my favorite – a fairly vertical drop down a cool wavy, striped wall. After these is when it first felt like we were truly inside the canyon.
Rappels 5-6 (5:30pm - 7pm?)
Rappels 5 and 6 took us even deeper into the canyon, and we started to see some water. The walls of the canyon narrowed, which was fun, but also reduced the amount of light that was coming into the canyon.
I lost track of time at this point since we don’t have any photos between 5:30 and 10:30pm, so all of the times are just estimations.
Rappel 7 (7pm? - 8pm?)
Rappel 7 is known for dropping directly into a pool of water. Given the recent precipitation, we anticipated that the pool may be quite deep, so we sent Alex (the most knowledgeable of us) to scout first. He left the rappel station, and after a few minutes we heard him yell up that he was now very wet. Given that, we decided to have him set up a guided rappel for Tyler and me so we could avoid the same fate. The guided rappel was set up where we would use the rappel device on one strand of the rope and attach to the other strand with a carabiner and sling like a zipline. Alex braced himself between two walls to “anchor” the zipline while I came down. I then attached myself to him to add additional weight to the anchor when Tyler came down. I enjoyed this one, since it was like ziplining but a bit more adventurous.
Rappels 8-9 (8pm? - 11pm)
After rappel 7, it became almost completely dark inside the canyon, which slowed down our progress quite a bit since the routefinding became much harder. We also had a bit of a complication where Alex’s headlamp ran out of batteries. He had forgotten his original headlamp at home, so picked up a new one that morning, but could only find a rechargeable headlamp and not one with swappable batteries. When the charge ran out, we could not replace the batteries and thus had to continue with only 2 headlamps for the 3 of us.
We took around 3 hours to locate and rappel the final 2 rappels due to difficulties with routefinding/darkness.
The final rappel, number 9, was an exciting free-hanging rappel, which I also enjoyed, but it would have been nice to see the view. We didn’t take any pictures because it was completely dark…
Canyon Exit (11pm - 12:30am)
We finished the technical part of the canyon around 11pm. The “advertised” time to get back to the trail from the end of the canyon was half an hour, but again due to the darkness, we took a lot longer, so got back out to the road around 12:30am.
Our original plan was to take the shuttle back to the parking lot, but we had obviously missed the last shuttle by quite a bit. We tried to hitchhike for a bit, but there weren’t many cars coming. Finally, we walked over to the nearby Zion Lodge to see if we could find at least a place to sit down. They weren’t perturbed in the slightest at 3 grimy and tired canyoneers showing up in the middle of the night, and said it had happened a few times before. They said one of their security guards could give us a ride back out to the parking lot. We were very grateful and offered to pay them, but they declined.
Highlights
It was my first time in Zion, so I really enjoyed just seeing all of the beautiful scenery and views. I also enjoyed the sense of adventure throughout the trip, even though by the end it had ventured into “Type 2” fun.
Challenges
Routefinding, both on the approach and inside the canyon, was considerably trickier than we thought as relatively inexperienced canyoneers. We also had an unfortunate coincidence of having an hour less daylight than planned due to DST ending. Nevertheless it was a good learning experience and next time we would hopefully be much faster :)
