HANGING CANYON

You’re soaring in a couloir surrounded by giant slabs of granite a vertical mile beneath the great summit. A few hundred feet below, trickles of snowmelt gather into one stream seconds before leaping off a cliff to evaporate another mile above the floor of Owens Valley. The air in here is strange, punky and grainy but soft and contradictory like rotted wood. Those shaded back corners are BAD, then steady flow along this one sunlit wall carries you lightly out toward the drop off. Measure height by one ancient snag jutting from a ledge. A bit above going in and below coming out…At the canyon’s mouth the air abruptly roughens. Warm breeze against the cliff below rising diagonally joins at this point with chilled outflow from above. You circle twice, tight as possible, unable to stay in the strongest lift but regain barely height to try the couloir one more time.Vigorous little tufts of effervescent cloud cycling not far overhead drift west to east in the stronger wind aloft. Their shadows sliding across steeps all around make it doubly difficult to anticipate which spot will be sunlit next.This last foray the outflow is absent and those shadows in back gone. Overhead the nearest cloud is dissipating, so with more sun pouring in to warm things, why less lift? That vanished cloud was fed from a thermal in the adjacent canyon, and with it gone some interlocking effects are reversed. Air at the couloir’s newly lit floor expanding, blocks downdrafts spilled from snowfields out of sight above – and it was they who augmented that feeble lift out at the cliff. Confusing? Yes, but given the right clues, logical. Deciphered, this puzzle starts to feel like a fist. Time to hurry out before it closes.Scant room here and none ahead. Turn back above a bright green lakelet. Its ripples betray strengthening breeze up into parts of the bowl that held only sink moments earlier. The good stuff directly above is beyond reach and now there’s a headwind limping out to safety. That snag? Looks much higher this time. Push over! Speed is life. Skimming only yards above a dished rock floor, you reach the precipice with speed to pull back up in lift that… should be there.Or, while the warm valley breeze still flows up this cliff, without additional energy from those shady downdrafts, there's nothing here but smooth zero. And now shadow from a new cloud steals across far below, blanketing talus at the cliff’s base and deflating that lift too.After turning again beyond the cliff, you're down to eye level with its lip. Game over, time to go.However… This little stream leaping off the cliff casts a fine mist you couldn’t see from above, lit by a sunbeam with gay fragments of rainbow. Bad angel: should you? Good angel: of course not.Well, why not? The bird could use a bath.Opposing factors influence this ‘decision’. In terrain so huge you’re usually not as close as it looks. On the other hand, thinner air at this altitude requires more room to complete a turn…For an instant the angle looks perfect, so with only token doubt you tip into a deep banking dive toward the mist. Force yourself to look not at the mist, but that glistening wall behind it. The cascade itself is pure deception. Steel your nerve. This will work if you do it right.Spray blurs the canopy and tickles the wings. When mist becomes splatter you crank hard-over and away, laughing like the lunatic you’ve just become. Your feathers dry in seconds, but the hues of that enveloping rainbow are imprinted in the mind forever.The pocket canyon consumed nearly an hour and you should be already running for home. You need to be a hundred miles south in time to catch the last lift there and set up a final glide. Problem is, this high ground you just fell off of is the route home.Now it gets really interesting.