UT Outdoors 

Yea, yea, I know I've sucked at posting to my blog lately, I've been working full time and doing school full time BUT I am finally almost finished with school so maybe one of these days I will have enough free time to fix the broken pages on here (I finally fixed the Choprock pictures!) and add some new stuff. I do at least have a new video from uhhh... not sure what to call the canyon. Here is the story of why.

I headed down to North Wash (down by Lake Powell) in October waiting to meet up with some friends. I had some free time to go check out a slot I had seen on Google Earth some time ago. Turns out it looked pretty good so I told my friends about it and we planned a time in November to hit it up. We split the exploration into two days but were able to finish what turned out to be a short but really good canyon. I came up with the name "Trachyotomy Canyon" since it drops into Trachyte creek and that was the most clever thing I could think of. Turns out one of my friends had been down part of the canyon but hadn't finished it, they were calling it "Witches Cauldron," which is a fine name, but everyone seemed to like my name and since we were the first we knew of to do a complete descent I sent out some beta with the name Trachyotomy. Soon after another Canyoneer got word that we had finished the canyon and informed us that he had been down it with guidebook author Mike Kelsey earlier in the year and he was sticking with the Witches Cauldron name. I was totally cool with him taking the naming rights since he was down first, but some people have adopted my Trachyotomy name since they read my beta before we knew the other guy had been down. Anyway, so now I don't know what to call the thing, so I'm calling it that one canyon. Here you go, a video of "That One Canyon"



Beta, along with other great routes, can be found here:

http://www.outdoorzen.org/site/beta/north-wash/witchscauldron.html

Mexico is known for its beautiful white beaches, clear blue oceans, and ancient ruins, but what about further north? It's all desert and desolate right? Not in the beautiful sub-tropical limestone mountains around the city of Monterrey. The richest, and most americanized city in Mexico is surrounded by some impressive tree covered mountains that house some of the best scenery and rock in the world. There are incredible limestone caves found throughout, 2000+ foot multipitch climbs on excellent quality limestone, and amazing water filled canyons including one of the most geologically impressive canyons in the world, Matacanes, named for a shower head like formation found in both of the canyons two caves.

I've put together a video of my recent trip, we did five canyons, only four of them are included in the video. The video is almost twenty minutes long so if you are only going to watch part, then fast forward to the last nine minutes, this will show off Mexico's showcase canyon. The video makes it look fun, but the canyon MUST be experienced to be believed, it's like an amusement park water ride on steroids!

Mexico Canyoning 2007 from Eric Godfrey on Vimeo.

If you are going to plan a trip to see Matacanes it is unlawful to go without a certified guide. Not all guides are good, the one's we went with were excellent and all ACA (American Canyoneering Association) certified, which goes above and beyond the governments certification. You can visit our guides website by clicking here.

Below are some pictures from Hydrophobia, the canyon not in the video. It was probably second to Matacanes, so I wish I had the video camera, but I was just so tired of lugging the thing around, it was nice to do a canyon without worrying about it.