North Rim Temples: Hayden, Vishnu, Tritle

The Grand Canyon is one of the truly sublime sights on earth. No one can gaze upon it and not be taken aback, staring in awe. I've seen this sight quite a few times and it's like coming into Yosemite Valley and seeing El Capitan. It is just overwhelming. The canyon is huge, at 200+ miles long and 10-20 miles wide. Its interior is a massively complex series of side canyons, but the most interesting part, for a climber, is the 5000-foot relief and the summits littered throughout the interior. These summits are called Temples and some of them are extremely arduous to climb. Most of them are not technically that challenging, but the actual climbing on the temples is frequently not the crux. 

The most well-known to climbers is Zoroaster Temple. This Temple is accessed from the South Rim, yet it in on the north side of the river. Oh, and it's higher than the south rim. To climb it involves over 10,000 vertical feet of climbing and 32 miles of travel. Oh, and five pitches up to 5.9. By far the most photographed temple is Mt. Hayden, which is very close to the north rim. This was the first objective for my most recent trip to the Grand Canyon.

Homie and I drove out Friday, after work, and picked up the Loobster in Grand Junction around 9:30 p.m. We continued until 12:30 a.m. before sleeping at a rest stop. 

Saturday: Mt. Hayden

After five hours of sleep, we got up at 4:30 Arizona time (5:30 MDT). We stopped in De Motte to get a campground reservation and then drove into the Park and directly to Imperial Point. After a quick bite, we packed up our gear and headed off at 11:10 a.m.

From our online resource and especially my friend Opie's trip report, we knew the descent was a thorn-bush nightmare. Everyone recommended leather gloves and thick clothing. Homie bought a pair of gloves at a convenience store on the trip out there. I brought some old ski gloves. I also had a grand plan for body protection. I wore a jacket and pants made of coated nylon, thinking the thorns would slide off this material and not pierce it. In that respect, I was right and it provided great protection. I went up and down the dreaded approach gully with just a single scratch on my ankle from not wearing longer socks. This protection came at a cost though. Not only did I look like a hazmat worker in my Day-Glo yellow suit, but I came to realize why people pay so much money for Gortex. By the time I took off the nylon after 45 minutes of descending my shirt was just as wet as if I had jumped into a pool. I lost at least two pounds of liquids in each direction. While my companions didn't look like they had just escaped from the local prison, they too were well protected. Homie would take to the leather gloves so much that he brought them along for every climb on the trip.

At the bottom of the descent is a narrow, loose, very dangerous gully. It is filled with loose blocks and loose logs and carpeted with loose sand and dirt on top of slippery, breakable sandstone. Homie led us down to the pinch where there was a fixed-line. The climbing is only 4th class here, but it's so loose that he used the line as a handhold. Once he was down, I decided to do a dulpherzits rappel, wrapping the rope over my shoulder and then back between my legs. I'd used this harness-less rappel technique once before, about twenty-five years ago. It was so painful that I vowed to never repeat it, but these were different circumstances. Normally you'd have to have padding to consider this technique, but I figured my Haz-Mat suit would provide some protection and a nice frictionless surface as well. 

I wrapped the rope around me and when weighted it, we heard something move above. Loobster, who was off to the side, screamed, "Look out! Bill! Bill!" I couldn't see anything from where I was, but I heard the booming sound from above and knew trouble was coming. I tried to move out of the way to my left, but there was nowhere to go. I couldn't go right with the rope around me. I was stuck directly in the path of a huge rock. When I finally saw the rock come over the edge, I thought, for the fourth time this year, that I was dead. The rock was a rectangular block shaped like three microwave ovens, end to end. If I was downclimbing this section, I would have died, as there was no way to avoid this rock, as even jumping down the cliff would only have the rock landing on me. In an instant, I knew my only hope was to jump over it, if the tumbling of the rock allowed such a maneuver. Being attached to the rope allowed me to jump and yet not fall down the cliff. The rock crashed right in front of me and as it came down I leapt into the air doing my best to emulate Michael Jordan. Aided by life-threatening adrenalin, I sprang into the air for a personal best 12-inch vertical leap. I sucked up my legs and the block passed beneath me. I immediately thought of Homie down below, but he is young and quick and he was on the ground. He scampered out of the way before the boulder demolished everything at the bottom of the cliff. Yikes!

Once through the heinous bushwhack, we made our way over much easier terrain down to the saddle and then up to the base of the route on the Southeast side of the temple. We got to the base of the route after 70 minutes and I was heading up the first pitch after an hour and 25 minutes. The route is three pitches long, but the last pitch is mostly a 3rd class scramble. I led on a 9.3 mm line and a 7.8mm line. Homie and Loobster would simul-second on different ropes. The first pitch was pretty bushy and, in fact, the whole route could use a good wax job. I ran out 150 feet of rope on surprisingly fun 5.6 climbing to a big ledge. The boys followed and I headed up the second pitch, traversing right over to a neat chimney, which I climbed for a bit before moving left out onto the face where there was a good hand crack. I stopped at another good ledge after probably 120 feet where there were two old bolts and a newer one. Looby and Homie followed easily and I then scampered up easy ledges to one 5th-class short section and up to just below the summit. The direct finish was too tempting to pass up. It was completely unprotected, but consisted of an eight-foot, 5.9 boulder problem. I grabbed the top of the wall and used the only foothold out to the left, smearing my right on the vertical face. I deadpointed to another edge and repeated that one more time, before mantling up the finish. I was on top. Both Loobster and Homie took the direct finish as well, putting their rigorous gym workouts to good use.

The raps went easily if you don't count the macrame knots I made out of the ropes. In Opie's report he mentions doing the return trip in 1h38m. Now, as any of my friends or family will tell you, I'm not normally a competitive guy, but I wondered aloud whether we could match "Opie Time." We reversed back to the bushwhack, donned the yellow suit, and thrashed upwards. The ascent of the gully was nearly as dangerous as the descent, but we were careful. Above we headed more to the left and found the going marginally easier. We got back to Imperial Point 5.5 hours after leaving it, doing the return trip in an hour and twenty minutes. We were greeted by a female ranger and her group. They treated us as if we'd just returned from Everest. 

Sunday: Vishnu Temple

I was put off by the 12 miles of hiking just getting to and from the rim for Manu, so we switched to the 3-star Vishnu Temple. If I had known what I know now, I'd have stuck with Manu...

My phone's time was messed up and I inadvertently got up at 4:20. When this was brought to my attention we went back to bed until 4:45 a.m. It was quite cold (37 degrees) while we dressed, nuked some coffee and breakfast burritos, and headed for Cape Royal (with Cheese, for those Pulp Fiction fans). 

The ghost bison of the Walhalla Plateau were supposed to be mythical beasts and when I noticed the big, dark shapes moving off to my left on the drive in, I thought I was hallucinating, but then an entire herd came thundering out of the darkness and into my headlight beams. Bison at the Grand Canyon? Yes! The North Rim of the Grand Canyon is high, over 8800 feet in some spots, and it's even higher a ways back from the rim. We'd see this herd the next day as well.

It was more than an hour's drive from our campsite at De Motte and we didn't hit the trail until 6:45 a.m. We'd regret wasting those 45 minutes of daylight at the end of the day. The guidebook rates this temple "Difficult", the hardest rating, with "serious elevation change." This is true. The total amount of climbing would be only 5000 vertical feet - about what Longs Peak entails - but that does not tell the story. Nor does the total mileage. So much so as to render these statistics almost meaningless. We hiked for 10 minutes on a nice, paved trail out to Cape Royal and took some photos of our objective. Then we backtracked a hundred feet and left the trail for the rest of the day.

We dropped off the rim with some easy scrambling and then descended loose dirt and scree slopes to a small cliff, which we scrambled and continued down to a larger cliff. Here we traversed along a very cool ledge for a few hundred feet. The ledge narrowed to a foot in width at one point and Homie found it more secure to remove his pack so that he could better keep his weight over his feet. This section would be the most enjoyable of the entire day. In fact, climbing a temple like Vishnu is really a curious endeavor. It is indeed very hard and very physical, but it doesn't involve difficult climbing skills. The route is only rated 4th class, though it is probably more like 5.2 or 5.3. The mileage and vertical are large, but well within range of a strong hiker. So, why isn't this temple climbed more often? We were aiming for the 29th overall ascent. The first ascent was done in 1945, before Everest was climbed, but the tallest mountain on earth has now been climbed over 3000 times now and Vishnu is still under 30 ascents. Clearly, it is because it doesn't appeal to most people, and for good reason. It is grueling and dangerous. Not life-threatening dangerous, mostly, but almost every step is fraught with some type of danger. 

We descended down and to our right to a nice camp spot, arriving there in 50 minutes. After one false descent, we found the first rappel anchor, around a huge block. This rappel was only twenty feet long and while very steep was near a squeeze chimney. We'd all climb up this on the way back, without a belay, but we fixed a rope here. We then dropped down into the big, brushy gully on our right and descended quite a ways to the top of the precipitous Coconino band, where we fixed a hundred-foot rope (the rappel and jug is only about eighty feet). The rappel was dead vertical at the top and the bottom thirty feet hung free. This would make for some strenuous jugging on the way out. We stashed the jugging gear and some extra water here. Of course, we'd also left behind two ropes, so we continued much lighter. We still had a few slings, harnesses, a 100-foot section of 7.8mm rope and helmets, along with our food, water, and extra clothes.

We now descended and started a traverse to the east (our left), contouring into the Vishnu Drainage. We laboriously picked our way down through two Supai cliff bands. The first band was actually two separate cliffs separated by a significant slope of lesser angled terrain.  The first cliff was descended by steep, juggy 3rd class climbing. It took us a while to find the next section. The description was to climb "over and under a chockstone" at the top of a squeeze chimney. Indeed this was exactly the case and was perhaps the most fun climbing of the entire day - all thirty feet of it. We cut across the drainage just above the third band. Here is looked like there was no way down, but ledges connected and we zig-zagged down the band and into the drainage. We didn't stay long, though. We started a mile-long traverse just above the famous "Red Band". The Red Band is the most monolilthic cliff band in the Grand Canyon. Breaching this band is frequently the crux of the temple approaches, but for this temple we started above it and would never need to dip below it. 

I don't know how to adequately describe the next mile. It took us a solid hour, working hard the entire time. We traversed a steep slope, yes, but the slope consisted of loose boulders, steep side gullies, dense brush, prickly pears, and scrambling problems. Rarely did a single step not gain or lose elevation. Working so hard, yet barely getting closer was frustrating. It took us three hours to start this traverse and we were four hours and five minutes into our day when we arrived at the Freya Castle - Vishnu col. We took a break here to eat and drink. We were all in complete agreement that we must get out of the canyon before dark, as the going was so complex and there were hardly any signs of passage besides the cairn every twenty minutes or so and our faint footsteps in the loose soil. We did the math. We started with 11.5 hours of total daylight. The height of Vishnu was three hundred feet below the rim, so the climb out would be bigger than the climb in. We'd hopefully be quicker knowing the route (if we could remember it all), but we'd also be more tired. We needed to summit this mountain in six hours.

In order to save some energy, the Loobster and I ditched a lot of our gear here and combined it into one pack. We headed up the North Ridge of Vishnu 4h20m into the day. Breaching the first two Supai bands was easy but the monstrous third band stymied us. The description said to traverse to the right to the second "bay." We had no idea what a bay was, but in retrospect, if we had just looked at the dang photo in the guidebook, we'd have known where to go. This was an error that cost us at least twenty minutes as I probed to possibilities that ended in solid 5th class climbing. Homie saved the day by finally biting the bullet and hiking so far around to the right that he found the route. The Loobster and I followed. 

We entered a gully and climbed upwards on some solid, fun scrambling that was way too short-lived before got into loose, crumbly climbing. We topped out the last Supai band and then continued up the gully into the Coconino band. After topping that we traversed hard left into another loose gully and then up a steep slot to a sub-ridge of the North Ridge. Up to that point we'd been climbing mostly on the west face, near the north ridge, but this is a big mountain. We scrambled upwards on complex ground through some more cliff bands to a final steep slope that led to the Kaibab cap. The Kaibab is limestone and generally pretty solid with plentiful handholds. We did some 3rd and 4th class scrambling with one tricky low 5th-class crux which put us nearly at the summit. The final block was twenty feet high and nearly vertical. It was so intimidating that the Loobster didn't believe it could be correct. Homie and I were surprised as well, since the guidebook said the final section is surmounted by a 10-foot crack on the east side. I can categorically state that this is incorrect. I looked on the east side from the summit and there is no crack there. You can descend 4th terrain in that direction a bit but then get cliffed out. When I saw the stack of cheater rocks at the start of the steep wall, I knew it had to be it. Also, it was clearly the highest point. :-)

The climbing was probably 5.2 or 5.3. The holds were really positive and the only difficult part was the lack of footholds at the start. The summit was quite spacious with a military-style foot-locker summit register. We were the first ascent of the year and indeed the 29th ascent. It was climbed twice in 2008, once in 2007, once in 2005, once in 2002, and once in 2000. Vishnu is not a real popular summit. It had taken us six hours and 25 minutes to gain the top. We stayed for 15 minutes and while we didn't say anything until then, we knew ascending the last half-hour meant being caught in the dark. It was also clear that after so much effort, we weren't going to turn back without this summit. We'd worry about the consequences of getting lost in the dark when the situation came up.

We started down with some urgency, to be sure. Eleven and a half hours minus six and a half hours plus gave us less than five hours to reverse our route. The descent back to the saddle went quickly, taking just 80 minutes. We ate and drank and moved on after ten minutes. Seventy-five more minutes and we were back across the traverse and the Vishnu drainage. It had taken three hours to get there on the approach and now we had to climb up 1900 feet instead of descending it. It was 5 p.m. and we had 90 minutes of daylight. We really wanted to get up the fixed lines before turning on the headlamps, but we were all fading a bit. I started to have some serious thigh cramps here. Homie fed me three electrolyte tablets and I downed the rest of our Gatorade. The cramps went away about 30 minutes later and a potential disaster was avoided. 

We got to the first line in 45 minutes and Loobster jugged first. Once on top, he lowered the jugging gear back down and while Homie jugged, Loobster hauled up all three packs. I went last and everyone moved pretty efficiently up this line, especially Homie who last jugged seven years ago on Shiprock. We packed up the rope and carefully picked our way up the prickly-pear infested gully to the second fixed-line. Homie was nearly at the top, just climbing the rock and grabbing the rope, by the time I arrived. He hauled up all three packs in less than a minute and belayed the Loobster as he climbed this section. I also climbed it and we stripped off the harnessed and packed up all our gear. We also turned on our headlamps. Earlier I was quite concerned about finding our way back to the rim and kept going over this section in my mind, trying to remember each section and in which order they came. I needn't have worried because Homie did a great job finding our footprints on the way back to the rim. He has a great sense of direction and is a natural route finder. It was tiring, dirty work, but after 45 minutes we finally regained the rim and the paved trail. There was much rejoicing and high-fiving. We'd done it.

The roundtrip for this adventure was only 9 miles, but we moved nearly continuously and it took us 12.5 hours. Besides the five minutes on the paved trail at the start, there isn't a single step that is on any trail and most of the terrain is difficult, loose, and dangerous. Prickly pear cactus cropped up often enough that we all had numerous painful encounters with these desert beasts. The hiking is on loose, steep dirt and talus and cliffs with friable rock. In the Grand Canyon there are tiers of vertical cliffs

Monday: Tritle Peak

Today was mostly a rest day. We were pretty beat up from the day before and didn't set an alarm. We lounged around a bit upon waking and then headed back into the park. We still hadn't been to the main area of the North Rim: Bright Angel Point, where there is a nice lodge with many cabins, all clustered close to the rim. Despite having no vacancy in their 130 rooms, the place didn't seem crowded. The experience here is nothing like the crazy zoo on the South Rim.  The road out to the North Rim doesn't open until the late Spring and by then it is quite hot down in the Canyon itself, so the ideal time to come here is in late September to early October. I'll definitely be back.

We hiked the short trail out to the Bright Angel Point and this is a great trail, built right into the rock with wonderful exposure everywhere and frequent places to stop and rest. We took advantage of them all, despite the entire trail being only a few hundred yards long. Near here is also where the North Kaibab tops out. This in fact is the only point where all of us had been to the North Rim before. We have all done the Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim hike/run where we started on the South Rim and hiked over to the North Rim and back. Since we had all only done this in the early Spring, the North Rim was still inaccessible by car and snow covered the ground. 

We had a great lunch in the large dining room of the Lodge, with it's 30-foot vaulted ceiling. My view out the huge, picturesque windows was of Zoroaster and Brahma Temples. There are probably nicer places to eat, but not that many. Outside is a huge stone deck with wicker rocking chairs. I longed to sit there and just stare at the canyon, or perhaps, read a book. Instead, I decided we needed to climb something. Homie had mentioned that Tritle Peak, on the road out to Cape Royal, was only a mile, roundtrip, from the road. The guidebook said the 4th class route could be approached in under an hour. I felt this was a fitting objective for our rest day and we were off.

The Point Rooseveldt trailhead the Loobster opted for a nap instead, claiming that his `/3-pound burger had put him into a coma. I was ready to go when Homie walked around from the other side and said, "Geez, what do you have in that pack? It's huge!" My tiny HAWG pack was filled with a 100-foot rope, some gear, and a harness. I figured Homie would appreciate the security of a rope since the route, while only rated 4th class, mentioned an 80-foot rappel. Chastised for my caution, I hurriedly emptied my pack and we were off.

We followed the trail a couple hundred yards out to the point and then dropped down the ridge heading straight for our temple, which lay on the other side of an even larger and, from the looks of it, considerably harder, temple that blocked the ridge. We dropped down on the north side and did more of the now-familiar but persistently unpleasant side-hilling. Once past the big temple, we side-hilled around Tritle to get to teh easier East Ridge. We were a little taken aback by how steep the climb was. Homie commented that this was "California 4th class," noting the difficulty of some of the Sierra summits. I climbed up in my running shoes, wondering why I left the climbing shoes behind along with the rope. The crux section was about fifteen feet long, but it was sixty feet off the deck and involved some liebacking and mantling. I thought the climbing was more like 5.3 and it felt serious because of the exposure. Homie had brought a 10-foot piece of webbing and after tying loops in both ends we had eight feet with which to "belay" Homie. I sat on the scree-covered ledge holding one loop and dropped the other end to Homie. He threaded the other loop around his left wrist and proceeded up with caution. This was a crazy arrangement, of course. With the sling attached to his wrist, I couldn't give a constant tug of security and if he fell, I'd take a jolt as his arm extended, likely pulling me off as well. But he wasn't going to fall and just needed the psychological security that I was there for him. 

Above this was a series of boulder problems where you could grab the flat top of a ledge but were given minimal footholds. I solved each one with some combination of mantles. Soon we were on top, signing the register. We'd gone from the RV to the summit in 34 minutes. After ten minutes we carefully reserved our route back to the ground, using the same sling-belay illusion for security. We were back at the car after an hour and twenty minutes and immediately headed for Zion. Our plan was to bag something short the next morning and drive home by that night. 

Back in the day, I'd park my RV in Yosemite, in the parking lane adjacent to El Cap Meadow and sleep there for many nights. Nowadays that's a difficult feat to pull off, but I figured we could pull the same trick in sleepy 'ole Zion Park. Those country bumpkin rangers probably are in bed by 9 p.m. Sure enough, when we passed through the east entrance gate, it was closed down. A bunch of signs had warned us that RVs were not allowed to drive through the Zion tunnel without an escort. I knew about this restriction, but we had no intention of traveling through the tunnel to the main canyon, for we wanted to climb a done on the East Side. Our plan was to just park in the turnout for our climb and sleep there.

I drove to our turn-out and pulled over and almost immediately a ranger lady pulled up beside us. She had just closed down the entrance we had come through and pulled over to make sure we knew the tunnel wasn't an option for us. Now, I had a bit of a dilemma here. I couldn't come out and admit that we planned to sleep on the side of the road since that was illegal, yet there were no camping spots whatsoever on this side of the tunnel. I also didn't want her to think that my plan was go through the tunnel since that would have been very dangerous and illegal. Hence, what was I doing? When she walked up to my window, I spoke first: "Do you know a good place to turn around?" Now at this point I hadn't done anything technically illegal. When asked, I assured her that we had no intention of going through the tunnel, which was true, but I'm sure she thought I must have been planning this, since most RVers don't sleep by the side of roads. She asked, "Well then, what were you thinking when you came in here?" "Uh... Umm... We just wanted to see the sunset on the Checkerboard Mesa..." 

She drove off and I drove down a bit further before finding a spot in which to turn around. This lower turn-out was a bit flatter and we decided to sleep the night there. The Loobster, ever the law-abiding citizen, was his usual Nervous Nelly, imagining roving bands of rangers on nocturnal patrol, wielding nightsticks. I ignored him and we started up a movie. Two hours later we figured we were in the clear and went to sleep. An hour later a ranger on nocturnal patrol was pounding on my door. The Loobster was wide awake, too anxious to sleep in fearing the inevitable. I was blissfully sawing logs in the back when the Loobster woke me up. He said, "Get up there and deal with this dude." 

I opened the door still rubbing the sleepy seeds out of my eyes. I found a round-faced, big-boned ranger who politely told me that "there is no sleeping in parking areas in Zion...just like every other National Park." "You don't say?" I said, "Why is that? We aren't bothering anyone." He said, "Sir, do I need to beat you with my nightstick?" I said, "Do you know who I am?" He gave me a blank look, so I continued. "I don't know exactly how to put this, but I'm kind of a big deal. People know me. I have many leather-bound books and Buzz Burrell and Dave Mackey are personal friends of mine." And then, in my best Scott Boulbol impersonation, I went for broke. "Look, I don't normally do this, but I'm just going to put it out there. If you don't like it, just send it right back to me. I think you should just let me sleep wherever I like, whenever I like. What do you think about there?"

And so, at 11 p.m., we found ourselves driving east out of Zion National Park...

Tuesday: Aires Butte and South Ariel Peak

The next morning we were back, however. After breakfast and some quick packing, we were off to the Southeast Ridge route on Aires Butte. It was 7:30 a.m. This was a 4-pitch 5.5 sport climb that involved a thousand feet of gain and two miles of hiking for the roundtrip. Courtney, the author of Zion Summits (highly recommended by the way) said the climb took 5.-7 hours for the roundtrip. I allocated three for us. A hundred yards down the road we dropped into a sandy wash, hiking north. Soon we left the wash and headed up the most beautiful slick slabs. Compared to the bushy nightmares of the Grand Canyon, this was the Brazilian wax job of approaches. It was like inclined pavement. We could gain altitude at any rate we liked or could sustain. Go up at an angle and took a bit longer, or power straight up and get a killer calf workout. 

We hiked to the "center of the universe", the saddle between Aires Butte and South Ariel Peak and then north towards our route. As we approached the steep, intimidating nature of the wall above us belied any sign of casual passage. Nevertheless, we continued upwards and around until finally spotting a drilled piton. The climbing just gradually gets steeper until if finally becomes 5th class. The route is never very steep and the climbing consists almost entirely of friction-slab climbing. Each pitch has 2-4 bolts or drilled pitons (I wonder how the first ascensionist decided when to use a piton and when to use a bolt, since no piton was actually placed in a natural crack). I led, trailing two 60-meter ropes for Homie and Loobster to simul-second on. We took the two ropes for the rappel descent. 

The climbing was super easy, but super fun. We all thoroughly enjoyed the climb and before I was done with the first pitch I was making plans to return with my wife and boys. Homie and Loobster climbed so fast I had trouble keeping up with the rope. We were on top an hour and twenty minutes after leaving the RV. We signed the summit register, which wasn't on the summit, but instead at the top of the route. We hiked around the spacious top and found the true summit on the far side in the midst of some trees. The raps went easily and after stowing the climbing gear we soloed up the 3rd class north ridge of South Ariel Peak. This jaunt only gained three hundred feet from the saddle. We picked out way down the East Ridge with some 4th class slab climbing and zig-zag traversing to get to the smooth, fun slick rock that led us clear down to the road.

We were driving home by 10:30 a.m. Right on schedule. It has been a great trip. We'd done five new summits over the two full days and two half days of our trip. I'd finally visited the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and while I can't imagine ever going back to Vishnu, I will definitely be back to the North Rim. I'm already thinking about Manu Temple...