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Outside Magazine June 2001
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Temple of Zoom
A speed ascent of a Grand Canyon spire proves that light is right


"THE BIG DAY," John said.

"It is," I replied.

My climbing partner and I were standing on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon at three in the morning and aiming the beams of our headlamps down the South Kaibab Trail--a mule-stomped trough of glistening ice between snowbanks. The trailhead sign read ICY TRAIL: CRAMPONS RECOMMENDED.

In the previous few days, with spring a week away, the South Rim had received a half-foot of snow; over on the North Rim, a foot had fallen. Crampons would have just slowed us down. We had light metal instep cleats strapped to our hiking boots, and we carried trekking poles.

The trail descended into blackness. We looked out across the vast reservoir of cold night air toward the distant North Rim, distinguishable only as a horizontal line above which the stars were scattered. We searched the inky chasm for Zoroaster Temple, the formation we'd come to climb.

"Can you make it out?" I asked.

"No," said John.

Zoroaster Temple is a Grand Canyon landmark, an immense mountain rising inside a colossal rift. It's shaped like a pyramid and topped with a 700-foot, custard-colored sandstone tower that was first climbed by Dave Ganci and Rick Tidrick, in 1958; before that, no technical rock climbing had been attempted in the Grand Canyon. After a pilgrimage to Yosemite had expanded the pair's conception of what was possible on big rock, Ganci and Tidrick, both in their early twenties, traded their clothesline for a nylon rope, and packed their World War II army angles and giant pitons forged by a Scottsdale blacksmith. Their epic ascent took seven days to complete.

Topographically part of the North Rim, Zoroaster is more easily accessed from the South Rim. Although there are only six pitches of technical climbing, a round-trip climb of Zoroaster requires almost 30 miles of hiking and 20,000 vertical feet of elevation gain and loss—more than the trip up the south face of Everest and back from Camp II at 21,300 feet.

To plan the route to Zoroaster's final tower, Ganci and Tidrick had to scout out the tricky passageways up through the shelflike layers of shale, sandstone, and limestone. Once the entire route had been reconnoitered, subsequent ascents cut the rim-to-rim time in half. It's still considered the grand prize of climbing in the Grand Canyon. According to John Annerino's 1996 guidebook Adventuring in Arizona, 7,123-foot Zoroaster is "a remote, backcountry peak that requires at least three days."

We were going to attempt it in one.


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