Crazy Fun In Canyon Country

WE LOOKED OVER THE EDGE INTO THE DEPTHS OF THE EARTH, A BLACK ABYSS WITH (APPARENTLY) NO light, no walls, and no bottom. And yet it was into that lightless, wall-less, bottomless hole we intended to go. The fact that we planned to rappel into this particular hole in the ground with a guide who had done it before suggested very, very strongly that there were in fact light and walls and a bottom. But as John and Patricia, married adventurists from Colorado, and I peered into the Goblin’s Lair, a canyon in Utah’s Goblin Valley State Park, we could see none of that. We had to take guide Christopher Hagedorn’s word for it that the ground was down there, 90 feet below us.

I asked Patricia, a flight attendant and amateur pilot, what her anxiety level was. She said it was 3 now, would jump to 7 when she got to, not . Of the hundreds of customers Hagedorn, owner of Get in the Wild Adventures, has guided on rappelling trips, only three have looked into the lightless, wall-less, bottomless abyss and left without entering.