Our new sport - Canyoneering or Canyoning

Do you like to swim, rock climb, walk, jump, and rappel? If you do, you need to know of a sport called canyoning or canyoneering. (Depending upon where you live.)

Canyoning is the sport of travelling through a canyon using different techniques such as swimming, rappelling, and more. This sport is often done in remote locations and requires ultimate wilderness travel skills.

Most canyoneering is done in mountain canyons with flowing water. Countries all around the world have areas for people to participate in canyoning. The Rocky Mountains have numerous canyoneering locations in the US. The majority of canyoneering trips can be completed in a single day.

A word of caution. Canyoneering can be very dangerous. Canyon walls can be steep making rescue extremely difficult and time intensive.

One of our great members suggested this sport to us. I had never heard of it, but it sounds like a lot of fun. We have added this as a sport to Backcountry Secrets. Head on over and add your routes or search for some adventures!

A few weeks ago I was surfing the web and came across a page with a giant sculpture on it. I thought it would be fun to use Google Earth and see how many giant sculptures I could find. This video is the result of my boredom. Here are the coordinates if you want to examine closer:

Giant Stamp (41.505411573, -81.692457496)

Ketchup Bottle (38.662918939, -89.982383508)

Bow and Arrow (37.791521261, -122.389989817)

Ice Cream Cone (50.936455030, 6.948690859)

Bowling Pins (51.445331000, 5.480611000)

Big Bottle (54.574815724, -1.231978576)

Giant Spider (43.269220376, -2.932930972)

Checker Board (51.913074117, 4.472107467)

Garden Hose (47.999729921, 7.830358741)

Pickaxe (51.310555997, 9.503194892)

Button (39.952229114, -75.193698905)

Noah's Ark (37.783276752, -97.464872569)

Airplane on Road (36.109354066, -115.150417173)

Umbrella (41.587398462, -93.621451805)

Baseball Bat (41.881976590, -87.643125562)

Pool Balls (51.956976100, 7.618386775)

Giant Sundial (33.824449271, -111.921772867)

Statue of Liberty (40.688995748, -74.044564691)

A new feature to track points

We have had a few requests to make it so our users can see what points were added most recently. So to oblige we are reformatting the home page to include the last 10 points added.

We are also excited to announce the release of our first RSS feed. The RSS feed will contain the last 10 approved points with the following information:

1. Point Name and State/Province the point is located in.
2. The member who submitted the point and the date of submission
3. Directions to the point
4. All of the sport descriptions at the point.

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Road Side Hiking for the Kids

For the first time in 5 months the temperature gage read above 50 degrees! I'm so excited for the fun weather to be back. To kick off the good weather we went "hiking".

Have you ever stopped at a rest stop on a long trip and noticed one of those signs for a "trail" and thought to yourself, "How much of a trail can there be at a rest stop?" I have plenty of times, but my attitude was changed this last weekend.

My sister left some soda in her camp trailer this winter. One of the cans exploded and leaked all over her floor. Last Friday was the first day in a long time that felt nice enough to clean it up. So she gathered her 4 kids and husband to help her clean out the camper. They cleaned and cleaned, but when her kids found out that they weren't heading camping they were bummed and upset. They decided to take the trailer for a "test-run." They called us up and asked if we wanted to go hiking at the rest stop on Interstate 15. I figured we had nothing better to do so we met them at the rest stop for lunch and a little spring warm-up hike.

The entire path was paved, gained a total of 50 ft in elevation, and was .8 miles long. It was not what I would call strenuous. However, the kids LOVED it. They used the GPS to "find" their way around the path, searched for snakes on the lava rocks, viewed dormant volcanoes from an observation tower and even saw a lion in a cave. (Ok so the lion wasn't real, but don't try to convince them otherwise.)

So what did I learn from this exciting trip? I learned that some of the best kept Backcountry Secrets can be found 100 ft from an Interstate. Next time you're travelling a long distance, it might just be worth taking that nature trail hike at the rest stop.