UT: Zion A Christmas Day Hidden Star and Yankee Doodle 12-25-2020

Tim Hoover and I got out for a bit of casual fun in the sun. Here is the trip report:

TR on Latest Rave

But, hard for me to pass up a chance to rant.

CAIRN RANT

There was a cairn as big as a house for the first rappel. UGH! (well, a small house).

All these rocks were built into the cairn. Some will claim that a cairn good for 1500 lbs is SAFE!!!

No. A huge cairn discourages inspecting the webbing. But inspecting the webbing is important for safety. In Death Valley, the new standard is to make cairns where the webbing is inspectable without taking the cairn apart. The selection of rocks here were not big enough to do that really, but given the good geometry and three big rocks, I rebuilt this anchor into a three-rock anchor, easy to inspect. And solid enough for this rappel.



The picture shows my 3-rock anchor. And imagine all these rocks stacked up atop that, not improving safety, definitely discouraging thorough webbing inspection.

Tim rappelled down. The rappel is long and convoluted, so it took awhile. This gave me the time to consider other choices. This particular pothole offers excellent geometry, but the drainage from here shifted a bit to the right before heading down. This anchor location leads to rope groove in four places further down... ugh. The next pothole down, however, offers a more-friendly rappel line, from the grooving standpoint. After Tim rappelled, I moved the anchor to the next pothole down...


And it came out like this. Much better, yes?

Tom