Canyoning in Hells Canyon

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Originally uploaded by Travelling Runes.

One day of the trip I went for canyoning expedition down Hells Canyon that feeds into the Dalaman river.

The trip was guided by Vedat from AlternatifOutdoor - this canyon is not reachable without support. Vedat does this himself about once a year but the last time he took this trip with a group was about 5 years ago and he does not think that anyone else comes this way.

The group was me, Vedat, Jack from New York, Jenni and Fred (?) and Aise from Istanbul. We set of by Landy to the top of the mountain and then hiked in down the old path that was used before the road (track!) was put into the villages. This path is not used any more - as we discovered when we got to the bottom where we needed to cross the only bridge to get into the canyon. The bridge was still there - just - but looked like a scene from Indiana Jones and since no one of us where heroes we abseiled in instead (more fun :). Most of the way down was rough scree - which was interesting as well.

From there - it was a scramble done the canyon floor around and over boulders and other rocks. More abseiling in places and some very adventurous leaps and jumps. As we got deeper - the canyon got more sheer - at points it must have been about 10 feet wide and 1000 feet deep with sheer walls. There must be some amazing climbing and abseiling on those walls.

We also started to encounter water - deep, cold, clear pools as we traversed the water hewn native rock. At some places the pools were 20 feet deep and 100 feet long and we had to swim for it - baking hot to ice cold to baking hot :).

Overall the canyon took about 8 hours of non stop scrambling and swimming with only brief stops for wonderfull packed rations provided by vedat (bread cheese tomatoes cucumber peaches and deep frozen peach juice). We emerged beaten and bruised for about 1 hour of hard rafting to get back to the base (and a lot of swimming).

Amazing!

A few pictures posted below - but my camera ran ouot of power at the begining so I am hoping to get some pictures from the others.

Comments

[Stag Weekend Activities]

Looks and sounds great but where is the Dalman River? We do canyoning in Wales but the sky isn't as blue as it is in your photographs!