Mountain of Mystery, September 15-16, 2001

Once in awhile, one's gotta climb a few summits, too. Zion offers quite a variety of difficult to access peaks, and our pinnacle of choice for this weekend is the mysterious Mountain of Mystery. Rising sheerly above Mystery Canyon, Orderville Canyon and the North Fork Narrows, no obvious route offers itself up, though it was climbed in the 70s by a group by coming up a branch of Orderville Canyon, finding a ramp that sweeps onto the North Face, then up the steep and brushy North Ridge. They climbed one pitch of 5.8 to gain the summit plateau, but failed to tag the true summit due to lack of time.

 

From the plateau-top east of Mystery Canyon, one can see the top third of the Mountain of Mystery, and the brushy, low-angle and promising North Ridge.

A short rappel off the plateau-top, and the fun begins.

Traversing a steep ridge on perfect rock (NOT).

And another rappel down a slab gets us to non-technical terrain on the pass between Mystery Canyon and the Orderville drainages.

The Southeast ridge was our original target. Here, you can kinda see the rugged ridge leading up to within a few hundred feet of the top. Unfortunately, that couple hundred feet looked steep on really bad rock. So we snuck a little closer to give us a better view...

 

Looking down Mystery Canyon, the big South Face of MOM on the right.

 

 

Here's looking up the slot section of Mystery Canyon.

 

And looking toward the head of Mystery Canyon.

 

And here's a closeup of the slot section of Mystery Canyon.