The news of the two men found in Choprock canyon last week hit me really close to home. Not just because I'm from Utah, but also because I have spent a bit of time hiking in the canyons of Southern Utah during my college days. I could envision myself in their shoes. I had a similar feeling reading Aron Ralston's depiction of his entrapment in "Between a rock and a hard place".
I've never been to Choprock, but have visited a few canyons in the Escalante area. My old college roommate decribes the canyon and sums up my feelings pretty well: Choprock is supposedly deep, dark, narrow and prone to getting log-jammed. From what I have been able to glean from the news and folks on the canyoneering yahoo group, it looks like a big unstable log jam backed up a deep pool of water and these two guys got stuck, hypothermia set in, and they drowned. The initial report was that their bodies were found in 15 feet of water. That's a ton of cold cold water. Just typing out that last paragraph gave me butterflies