Conditions:Imlay Canyon (Full)-Candition20170617 CanyonMonkey
Latest: |
17 Jun 2017 (8 yrs ago) |
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| Reported by: | CanditionBot (2103 reports) | |
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| Quality: | Amazing |
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| Waterflow: | ||
| Wetsuit: | ||
| Water temperature: | ||
| Difficulty: | ||
| Time: |
Trip report URL: http://www.candition.com/canyons/imlay
Comments: See the full condition report at Candition.com. Submitted by CanyonMonkey.
All condition reports
| Date | Quality | Waterflow | Wetsuit | Difficulty | Time | Team | Reported by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazing | | Full wetsuit 
| | | 6 people Beginner to Advanced | RFontaine (276 reports) | |
Comment: Always incredible and full value! Top notch beauty and fun
We just did the sneak route, posting beta here also for convenience. All pot holes very full and escapable without gear by mono-ing the pockets. Should still always bring a pair of hooks just in case. Water clean and comfy in a 5/4 wetsuit. Sneak route took us 10hrs.
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| Good | Deep pools 
| Full wetsuit
| Easy |  15 hours
| 5 people Advanced | Tcarlisle (75 reports) | |
Comment: We did full Imlay starting at the West Rim Trailhead. Water levels have begun to drop in lower Imlay. We hooked out of a few pot holes; but, because the water level is still pretty high they we not too difficult to hook out of. Anchors in good shape.
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| Good | Deep pools
| Full wetsuit
| Easy | 11 hours
| 6 people Intermediate to Expert | Tcarlisle (75 reports) | |
Comment: The canyon is full of water and in easy mode. No pothole escapes are currently required. All anchors are in good shape with good webbing on all drops. The long rappel in upper Imlay that has loose rock has been recently cleaned up some, but loose rocks are still an issue and will come down while rappelling so care is still needed there. Many of the pools are deep enough to jump into at the current water level but a depth check is still required. While the canyon is full of water it has been evaporating with levels slightly changing/decreasing week over week.
Our group started at the East Rim trailhead at 4:30 am and did the first rappels in the dark as dawn was breaking. We had skies, a clear forecast, and comfortable temperatures. We put wetsuits on at first sign of water. Wetsuits ranged from 4/3, 5/4, and thicker. As long as we were moving most of us were overly warm. The only time any of us got cold was after we stopped for a bit in canyon before moving onward. Water levels allowed us to keep moving so we didn’t need to speed a lot of time in pools working potholes which would have made us colder. Towards the end of lower Imlay we did hear what sounded like rockfall within Imlay. There was also a rockfall in the Narrows the preceding evening,which temporarily shut down the Narrows and injured some hikers.
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| Great | | | | 16 hours
| 6 people Intermediate to Advanced | RFontaine (276 reports) | |
Comment: This canyon is an amazing journey and is currently in exquisite conditions!!
We started hiking from Lava Point at 4am. Made it to the 1st rap in 1.5hrs. Upper Imlay is just okay. After the initial large rappels (that are just meh) , there is lots of downclimbing and wash walking! There are a few neat narrows but nothing compared to lower. This section is a one and done for me (not much juice for the squeeze). I will just do sneak route going forward. Lower Imlay is INCREDIBLE. We arrived at the crossroads around 12:30. Much of the canyon is dry and the potholes are all VERY low making escapes more challenging and fun! Probably only 1 swim in the entire canyon (that I can recall) most of the keepers are so low you can walk across. We didnt even wetsuit up until near the end of the canyon at last narrows! A 4/3 wetsuit was more than sufficient at this point. I loves experiencing Imlay in these conditions! Super fun mode!! | |||||||
| Great | Deep pools
| Full wetsuit
| Advanced | 15 hours
| 4 people Intermediate to Advanced | Caverfirst (2 reports) | |
Comment: Started at Lava Point at 6am and got a permit from the park to spot a car at the Temple of Sinawava (highly recommended if doing full). The pools in the narrow section were mostly full and pothole escapes were trivial. We found rap 1 with no difficulty, and used the station directly at the bottom. Rap 2 is 2 stages into the chest deep pools of watercourse and our 100ft ropes were not long enough for both stages requiring some sketchy down climbing. This pull also stuck our ropes requiring a climb up to recover. It looks like you can traverse the ledge at the bottom of rap 1 and avoid this nonsense. Also the second cliff rap series now has three rappels from trees before reaching the bolted anchors, which seemed to differ from the beta we had suggesting there were only two. Our 100ft ropes barely reached the bolted ledge from the last tree, so don't short rig yourself. The final rap seemed a little shorter than the 170ft advertised. I'd guess only about 120ft, so no need to add any extra margin to that 170ft rope. After the big series we walked SW along the ridge and did one more short rap in the watercourse before the long wash walk. From here it was smooth sailing in great (but not as good as Heaps) canyon to the finish. Overall aside from the long rap, the "Full" section was a not particularly interesting and IMO not worth the considerable faffing, I'd go Sneak if I were doing it again.
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| Amazing | High
| Thick wetsuit
| Advanced | 16 hours
| 5 people Advanced | MMclimbhigh (24 reports) | |
Comment: Imlay is currently in full pool mode. No hooking necessary. A ton of swims. Party of 5 took 16 hrs car-to-car with a bivy at the crossroads. Headwall raps are confusing? We managed fine with (2) 120's and a single 180'. Amazing canyon!
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| Amazing | | | | | CanditionBot (2103 reports) | ||
| Amazing | | | | | CanditionBot (2103 reports) | ||
| Amazing | Very Low
| Thin wetsuit 
| Special challenges |  28 hours
| 2 people | Willie92708 (1000 reports) | |
Comment: This was a blitz run from SoCal leaving at 2AM on July 5th, driving to Zion, getting a shuttle to Lava Point and hiking at noon. Since this was planned as an overnight we were not in any big hurry to get through the upper canyon. It took 2 hours to hike to the camp 8 tee off the trail at Potato Hollow. After the entry R1 & R2 we had significant water flow that soaked our legs on R3 (see picture). We were only in our hiking shorts at this point. The headwall rappels were dry (of course, they are offline) but plenty of water was flowing down the headwall. Below that we hiked downstream doing various "stupid pet tricks" to stay more out of the water instead of getting on our wetsuits. This was great fun and technically challenging but chewed up a bunch of extra time, especially with the massive weight of overnight backpacks. We made it to a spot with square right turn with log down-climb into a pool, slab into a larger flat pool beyond with a square left turn of a massively tall dihedral corner by the time it was getting dark. This location is after the 100 foot rappel down a slab RDC, out of the canyon floor. We camped there for the night at 9PM.
By 8AM on July 6th we were suited up an ready to get wet! We made the normal sneak route entry (past the 60 foot double big pothole rappel) by 9:20AM, and took time to eat breakfast. By 2:20PM we were at the last rappel into the Virgin River having done various down-climbs, one easy “log soup”, two dozen rappel, 2 “potshots” (one with a backpack, the other rope tied around a log) for guided rappels, pothole escapes using the drilled hooking holes as finger “mono’s” rock climbing, and doing one hooking move to exit one pothole. Generally speaking, all the pothole escapes were trivial because the water level was within a foot or 2 of the pour-over elevation. By 4:00 & 4:30PM (split for hike out) we were back at the Temple of Sinawava. We got dinner in Zion, headed back on the I-15 (had a 1 hour delay because construction made the I-15 one lane each way), and were back in CA that night. Doing the upper through R8 in hiking shorts was good. Going through some of the pools in the upper canyon before the campsite was quite chilly, but not so cold that we got significantly hypothermic (cold but not shivering). The next day we started out in wetsuits and were quite toasty most of the time. In my 3/2mm Xterra Tri-suit with neoprene gloves and socks, I was never cold, maybe a bit chilly for few minutes here or there, but overall was quite warm, even sweating from time to time. This wetsuit fits snug and it’s very stretchy, so it basically blocks all water exchange. Also the wetsuit’s outer shell is totally slick, so the water sheets off it and reduces evaporative cooling massively compared with most wetsuit’s porous surface. The water temperature in some pools was so cold that without my neoprene gloves the water made my hands numb within a minute, and was giving me “brain freeze” in some pools when the water hit my neck (I did not have on a wetsuit hood). And having been in Imlay twice before with my 5/3/1.5mm Xterra Tri-suit that also was more than warm enough, I’d say that these type of suits (sem-dry and slick surface) work extremely well without all the weight and bulk of thick dive suits. | |||||||
| Amazing | Deep pools
| Full wetsuit
| Normal | 15 hours
| 5 people | Willie92708 (1000 reports) | |
Comment: We started hiking from Lava Point at 4:30 AM, and I was sitting in a Zion Shuttle bus at 8:15 PM. We spent 2 hours doing the easy 5 mile hike to campsite #8 at Potato Hollow and few extra minutes figuring out exactly where to drop in. Raps 1 to 3 were easy and dry once we found the correct tree for rap 1. Further hiking down, we ran into the big headwall, and again had to spend extra time figuring out how raps 3 to 6 worked. Once down the headwall, a trail leads off the big ledge canyon right (up the larger tributary) and circles around down canyon to a short rap (or downclimb). From there on, we stayed in the watercourse and it's straightforward going, except for one 100 foot rappel off a big tree RDC well out of the canyon. Wetsuits were not needed until well into this section.
From here to the crossroads, we waded through numerous pools, some with quick sand on the edges, and some "log soups". From the 4 way junction (cross roads) there are several deeper pools and rappels in a deep part of the canyon. The last rappel in this section goes through 2 large potholes very open to the sky, the 2nd one with the larger drop can be jumped, but make sure to land several feet away from the pool edge as it has a shelf. Immediately after this pool is the overhanging alcove with a sandy floor that is used as a bivouac site and this is where the sneak route connects. We reached this point around 1 PM. From the bivy spot the lower section with many short rappels, downclimbs, and "log soups". The first log soup was the most time consuming to cross; most are easy by comparison, so don't despair! To keep things moving along quickly we used 5 short ropes of 60, 60, 45, 40, and 30 feet, since most of the rappel are under 30 feet, many under 20 feet. We jumped some pools, but only after checking them thoroughly, since the water in most pools looks like chocolate milk hiding even the shallowest objects. The water level was up to the brim on most every pothole, so no hooking was required. In fact nearly every pothole was easy to escape without partner assist. By 6 PM we had reached the last rappel into the Virgin River, and everyone was down and wading down the river by 6:30 PM. Overall a simply awesome canyon trip! | |||||||
| Amazing | | | | | CanditionBot (2103 reports) | ||
| Amazing | | | | | CanditionBot (2103 reports) | ||
| Amazing | | | | | CanditionBot (2103 reports) | ||
| | | | | Candition.com (287 reports) | |||
Comment: Most recent conditions reported at Candition.com
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| Good | | | | | CanditionBot (2103 reports) | ||
