Dothraki Canyon

Apr 7, 2019 — After such a wet winter, most of the canyons in the Zion area were still cold, so we set out to look for a viable dry canyon that didn't require wet suits. The fact that we're all particularly excited for Game of Thrones' new season was only about 20% of the reason why we chose this one, though unfortunately we didn't make enough memorably awful GoT puns… Anyway, this canyon itself wasn't particularly gorgeous, but it was a fun time and had some interesting rappels. The approach was actually one of the highlights, in my opinion. More efficient canyoneers could likely do the technical sections in less time, but we were being silly as usual and had two absurdly and unnecessarily long ropes we failed miserably at managing.

From the Squirrel Canyon Trailhead, locate a sandy road just south and follow it west to the cliff base. A social trail leads along the cliffs and wraps around a hill and into a gully. There are two gullies – don't take the one on the right. The social trail was well-traveled enough to be clearly human-impacted, but not enough to be totally obvious. Sandy and fun Class 2/3 scrambling leads up the unlikely cliff face to the crest of what's known as the Dragon's Back. We were pleasantly surprised to find that it was a long, narrow ridge with sheer drops on either side. There were only a couple of spots that required some care, but overall it's just a slow-moving, fun Class 2/3 sandstone ridgeline. The Dragon's Back led us to the head of Dothraki Canyon – take the right fork, the main canyon.

Dothraki Canyon consists of over a dozen rappels, many of which can be down-climbed, but apparently a recent rescue meant that ample bolted anchors were in place, making the going safe and easy. The canyon isn't so much a slot in the traditional sense when you think of slots, but rather more of a narrow crevasse that looks like it was sliced with a cleaver a bunch of times. There aren't any particularly sketchy sections, and anything that might be has the option to set up a handline or rappel. Toward the middle of Dothraki, the canyon narrows significantly, but anyone could likely fit through. The final rappel has a second rappel station, but we were happy to do the full rappel as one since we had enough rope and the rope pull was easy. A series of social trails leads out of the dirty, muddy gully and back up to the sandy approach, where we followed it back to our car. Running down the sandy slope was far superior to trudging up.