canyon exploring with Michele Angileri

Fosso Sambucaro

A little easy wet canyon, with some unusual features. The travertine of its numberous toboggans offers the best adherence, so ropes are needed only a few times.

I remember ...

When I'm lukcy I have a partner exploring with me. When I am really lucky I have 2 ... But this time 8 guys are with me at the meeting-place! What's happenning?

This is my chance to meet the Zorros, a group of lovers of Nature and Canyoning who feature a funny and thoughtless style. Zorros go canyoning since some years in Italy but also Corse and even Australia!
They follow this website since a few years, and they repeated some of the descents I describe here. Having read of search for partners in canyoning "Zorro" Maurilio e-mails me to propose a meeting. I have in mind an easy canyon to explore one of those days, and it seems to me the right place and the right way to know who the Zorros really are. Maurilio agrees.

And here we are! Friendly guys, nice to meet you! then we go to the place where will be left the car, by the exit of the canyon, and here we change to wear our wetsuit. And one of them asks me: Do you think it will be dangerous? ropes are really needed? I don't think there will be unusual dangers, I think will be easy but ropes are surely needed! I never used a rope before, never been in a canyon before ... Ok, I understand ... This is not the right place to try canyoning the first time. I don't know what we will find inside. I advice to begin canyoning in a dry canyon, and a well-known one!

It comes out the novices are two, both friends of a Zorro and unknown to the others. The 3 friends give up, and 6 people will explore the canyon.

At the starting point we choose gears to bring with. Zorros' gears are maily made of spirit and enthusiasm: ropes, wetsuit, harness, camera, nothig else. The rest is brought by me and Andrea, but it will remain unused, because the canyon will prove easier than I imagined.

In the descent Zorros showed themselves as a real group, something with its own typical behavior, different from the behavior of the individuals. A group has a kind of macro-conscience above the consciences of individuals. A group is like a train, while to explore a canyon works better a caravan of cars, each with its own driver, each independent. In a train, instead, wagons follow the locomotive (the guy who goes first and/or fast) even if it stumbles ...
The behavior of members of a group is only to testify each of them belongs to the group.

We go fast down this easy and nice canyon, as easy and nice is to stay with Zorros.

Manitou protect them.

Photographs in this website show ultralight ropes (6 mm ropes made of high tenacity fibers). Read multimedia book Ultralight ropes canyoning technique to learn how to use them.

Copyright © 2002- Michele Angileri. All rights reserved.