Thanks & Acknowledgements
This book has been in my head for a long time. I started putting it together in 2019 because I kept coming back to the same problem: canyoneering has a lot of great information scattered across guidebooks, forums, websites, videos, classes, and conversations—but for a beginner, there still wasn’t one obvious place to start. So I decided to try to build one.
What followed was years of writing, deleting, rewriting, moving sections around, trimming hundreds of pages, editing photos, changing my mind, changing it back, and trying to explain a sport that loves to answer simple questions with: “It depends.” Canyoneering101 only exists because a lot of people helped me along the way.
First and most importantly, thank you to my wife, Sarah. She has put up with the trips, the gear, the late-night writing, the endless canyon photos, and the countless times I have said, “I just need to fix one more thing.” Her support has been the foundation behind this entire project.
I also owe a huge amount to Shane Burrows of Climb-Utah.com and Tom Jones of CanyoneeringUSA.com. Their work helped fuel my early interest in canyoneering when the sport was much harder to research than it is today. Justin McFarland and Scott Nielsen also deserve a special thank-you for the countless hours of discussion, learning, debate, and growth on the Bogley.com forums in the early 2000s.
Family, Friends & Canyon Partners
Thank you to my family: Greg, Linda, Jayne, Matt, Jen, Sara, Brian, Brooke, Jeff, McKinley, and Miles; Chris and River Allen; Emma and Liam Dalton; and the Coleman family—Brian, Julie, Isaac, Nathan, Michelle, Emily, Joe, Anna, and Eric.
And to my friends and canyon partners—including Jeff Guest, Ian Napper, Dave Lamb, Brian and Kevin Stubbs, Ethan Baham, Josh Oyler, Matt Meldrum, Chris and Erica Riplinger, Trevor Parker, Michael Shifflett, Ira Lewis, Rick Green, and many others—thank you for the miles, the rappels, the mistakes, the laughs, the debates, the photos, and the memories.
If you ever answered one of my questions, invited me on a trip, corrected me, challenged an idea, let me use a photo, helped test something, or simply encouraged me to keep going, there is probably a little bit of your influence somewhere in these pages.
To everyone who contributed in ways big and small: thank you. I genuinely could not have done this alone.
—Brett C Johnson