North Guardian Angel ~
We move through the pre-dawn gloom in a quick, steady rhythm, hoofing it toward the North Guardian Angel, a cream-colored, triangular peak with sheer flanks. Marie Taylor, who grew up in nearby Rockville, has joined photographer James Q. Martin and me in Zion, where we’ve come for a week
of ridge-a-neering. James and I first met three years ago at Paradise Forks, and he’s since been a perpetual source of much-appreciated bad ideas. He’s lured me from my desk job to hump 60 pounds of rope up El Cap’s East Ledges, and lulled my ego into believing I can climb 5.12 offwidth (I can’t). He has yet to come up with a plan that involves bouldering, turquoise water, and sleeping in, but I’m hopeful.
After a couple days of research and talking with locals, we whittled our list of dozens of desert alpine climbs down to four potential routes, none harder than 5.8. But ratings in Zion’s backcountry are very much relative — the technical climbing on Zion’s sandstone crests won’t challenge a competent 5.9 leader, but the commitment factor is enough to make a 5.11 climber squirm. In the main canyon, rappel anchors are never more than 100 feet away. Out of the canyon’s confines, however, bailing does not mean catching the next shuttle bus back to the car. A maze of twisting slot canyons and sharp shrubbery, Zion’s backcountry lies hours from the nearest road. This is not the Zion of multiple, stacked parties sieging Moonlight Buttress or the Touchstone Wall. This is a Zion of wind, sand, starlight, choss ... and isolation.
We’d picked the West Temple for its position, Mount Kinesava for its prominence, and Mountain of the Sun for its grandeur, but the North Guardian Angel we chose for its high reward-to-pain ratio. With straightforward climbing, brainless route-finding, a spectacular summit, and superb rock, the Grade II 5.6 East Ridge is a perfect introduction to Zion ridge climbing. A rope, rack, and the-shirt-on-your-back mentality will suffice on this half-day jaunt with its three-mile approach on mostly good, flat trails. Above this, two hundred feet of checkerboard slabs lead to a saddle, where the climbing begins in earnest.
We weave up the ridge, connecting intermittent cracks and frictioning across featured slabs. Extremely exposed third- and fourth-class climbing on a gradually narrowing fin is interrupted by 30 feet of 5.6 — a short, vertical rock step typical of Zion’s less-traveled alpine realm. I fiddle in gear and rock onto a clean, slabby arête. A soft canyon breeze slides up the Guardian Angel’s flank.
Twenty minutes later we’re sitting on the summit, taking in the view of dozens of peaks — most unnamed, some unclimbed. The Southern Guardian Angel, an almost perfect mirror image of its northern twin, casts a dark shadow across the network of deep canyons beneath us. This fall there’s been an almost incessant drone of jackhammers, as workers carve out a new bus stop beneath Cerberus. Out here, you hear nothing but wind scraping against weathered stone.
I fish a small glass jar — the register — from beneath the summit cairn. I leaf through its yellowing pages, counting 11 ascents in the last year, with the most recent one coming a month ago. Moonlight Buttress sees that many in a week. Still, though esoteric, peak bagging is not new to Zion. Springdale locals picked off many of the prominent summits via sheep trails and low-fifth-class climbing in the 1950s and ‘60s, and Glen Dawson and Bob Brinto’s 1938 ascent via game trails and fourth-class scrambling of the Sentinel’s east face may be Zion’s first modern ascent.
Through the years, the list of desert alpine routes has grown, but the number of climbers in search of the rubble, exposure, and summits has remained relatively low. There are third-class scrambles and modern, bolted slab routes. There are nice, friendly-length moderate ridges, such as the ones we’re gunning for. And there are multi-day pursuits, like the link-up of the West Temple and Towers of the Virgin. First completed by Dan Stih and Ron Raimonde in 1998, the epic project took two seasons to scout, demanded dozens of 5.10 pitches, and featured a gully they dubbed the “Couloir of Death”. The route, fittingly for Zion alpine choss, has been repeated just once.