Mount Kinesava ~
The Cowboy Ridge (III 5.7), which follows the western spine of Mount Kinesava, is the most improbable, beautiful, and prominent of Zion’s ridges. From 30 miles away, the ridge looks like a simple connection, an obvious path from a beginning to an end, but this view is deceptive. On closer inspection, the ridge is a twisted, gnarled saw blade of ledges and notches, its sandstone fins and towers aligned like notched vertebrae.
Surprisingly, the intimidating 2,000-foot route only has four or five roped pitches. Stick to the very ridge crest and you get about a dozen fifth-class pitches. When the climbing grows difficult, a little investigation reveals a small ledge system 10 feet below. When an almost-blank face confronts you, a chimney appears.
We move slowly, gingerly weighting each undercut ledge, and jam the cracks rather than pull on the flexing flakes that punctuate the ridge. Anxiety fades with upward progress. We’re aiming for the massive red tower split by an ugly-looking offwidth clearly visible from the valley floor. Here, two-thirds of the way up the ridge, we pause, taking a 5.7 chimney in a cleft to the right, and then wiggling to the top of the tower. The wall in front of us is featureless; our options seem spent … until James downclimbs 10 feet and peeks around a corner. The Cowboy Ridge responds with its best pitch yet — a splitter 5.7 hand crack above Kinesava’s 1,500-foot western amphitheater. We move past the false summit, where the word “free” is spelled out in three-foot letters made from oddly uniform bricks of dark-brown rock.
Higher, I explore a large, carved-out channel in which, each spring, snowmelt cascades 1,500 feet down the amphitheatre. I study the rock. I wander toward James, hunched over a long panel of petroglyphs, following each symbol in the hopes of deciphering a story. The carvings, etched in a chocolate-colored varnish, show antlered creatures and men armed with bows and arrows. After a few minutes, James drops into a bed of soft grass, while I lean against a large pine. We work through two tuna fish sandwiches garnished with wayward granules of sand.
The trip’s final summit is only a 20-minute scramble up a white dome, but I don’t want to move. I want savor it like the final chapter of a great book.
I twist my fingers into a seam in a small boulder. The skin around my knuckles is red and tender, the crack painfully sandy. I keep twisting, though, imagining my fingers turning to roots that burrow deep in the broken sandstone until I become a semi-permanent fixture, like the petroglyphs and piñons. I remove my fingers and see that my knuckle is bleeding. I’ve reopened a week-old wound; it’s caked in fine, yellow sand and will surely become a scar. Aside from a few wayward cactus needles, it’s the only memento I plan to take. ~

After his second story on Southwest rubble wrangling, Oregon-based Fitz Cahall is patiently waiting for Climbing to send him to cover bouldering on a lush tropical island.