Descent into the Crater of Doom

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First Rappel

There is a group of canyons that drop into Fall Canyon from a multi-descent day Scott Swaney did in 2014 descending several canyons. Crater of Doom (3A III 6r 120 ft) was the furthest in and provided an adventurous approach with some rock band traversing to end it out. The canyon itself was short like many in the Grapevine Mountains. The descent was straightforward with some fun down climbs, but I was kinda disappointed there was no scary looking crater given the name.

Approach

From the Titan Canyon trailhead, we went left on the hiker trail and branched right on the upward ridge-fin trail that appears shortly afterwards. The approach was on decent quality rock, but gets spicier the further back you go. There is another approach listed from Fall Canyon, but we decided to go up the ridge to avoid repeating Fall Canyon on up/down.

Looking back on the ridge with the Fall Canyon wash visible below

At Precipice Canyon the hiking gets more interesting, crossing our first noticeable canyon.

Crossing upper part of Precipice Canyon

Later crossing the deeper Dark Shadow Canyon, things got a little spicy navigating a chossy rock band via a few 3rd Class moves right before rounding the ridge to drop into Crater of Doom’s wash. We were below the GPX track so I think higher up would have been a better traverse, but there would still be some light 3rd Class moves.

Traversing rock bands above Dark Shadow Canyon
(it felt less secure than this looks)

Dropping into Crater of Doom canyon was a simple scree-like descent. You could take a rappel through one of the short cliff bands right near the wash or take the gulley down.

The upper wash for Crater of Doom. Straightforward gulley down is a little to the right.

Descent

First rappel was 70ft off a boulder followed by a down climbable 12 ft section and a fun intermediate stemming downclimb 20ft.

R1 anchor
Fun stem downclimb

Then you start some fun back-to-back rappels with a cool 130 ft slick flute off a rock chock or cairn (R2). Followed by a 100ft off a cairn down a wide runnel (R3).

R2: 130ft
R3: 100ft

There was a good lesson about testing anchors, since when I came upon R3’s huge stack of rocks for a cairn anchor I thought it looked pretty good. However, when I gave it a pull test, it moved a lot and the right section has actually barely attached to the keystone. So we rebuilt it with the same rocks and it passed with flying colors.

Before
After

Then a 50 ft rappel (R4) and 135ft rappel off a cairn (R5) into Fall Canyon. Finally it ends with a 25 ft fiddlestick off a block (R6) before you start exiting the canyon.

Was really cool to get some practice fiddling this trip with people who have done it before.

Exit

It’s pretty clear when it’s the last rappel with a lot of foot-indentions in the wash from the popular Fall Canyon hiking trail. At the canyon mouth, I almost missed the hiking trail traversing back left towards the parking lot because I was so used to walking the wash all the way to the road.

Fall Canyon hiking exit

Technical Details:

  • R1 – 70ft off boulder
  • O – 12ft downclimb
  • O – 20ft intermediate downclimb
  • R2 – 130ft off rock chock or cairn
  • R3 – 100ft off cairn
  • R4 – 50ft
  • R5 – 135ft off cairn
  • R6 – 25ft fiddle off block

Summary:

  • Approach: 3 hrs (3mi, 2800 ft)
  • Descent: 2.5 hrs
  • Exit: 0:45 hrs
  • Total: 6:15