In March, Matt Mower and I made the first complete ascent of Meridian Tower to its true summit. Meridian Tower (7,332’), visible from downtown Springdale, is a large, flat-topped peak that is part of the Towers of the Virgin, just southwest of the Court of the Patriarchs.

David Everett and I had climbed Meridian Tower’s prominent detached pinnacle in April 2008, but we did not continue to the true summit. The mountain’s highest point, as with many Zion peaks, is a blob of red rock that sits on top of the formation, but there is a chasm of several hundred feet separating the summit from the pinnacle. From the top of the pinnacle, looking over toward the main summit, the final face appeared blank and unclimbable. We were climbing alpine style with small-diameter ropes, and the logistics of fixing a rope to descend into the notch and attempt the final face were daunting, so we descended.

In March, Mower and I approached the same way Everett and I had in 2008, from the north via Birch Creek. Before doing so, we traversed the south side of the canyon to access and climb a peak to the immediate east of the Meridian Tower, between Meridian Tower and Beehives. This is the first known ascent of this formation, which we called Chameleon Peak. We climbed it from the north side with lots of scrambling, interspersed with a few 5.6/5.7 sections. After descending back to Birch Creek, we repeated our 2008 route to the top of Meridian Tower’s prominent pinnacle (5.8 A0).

We carried a long 8mm static line, and once on the summit of the pinnacle we fixed the line to a tree and rappelled into the notch. Park Service employees remembered this tree, as they had watched it burn from town after it was struck by lightning.

There we came face to face with final pitch to the true summit. While the face looked blank from afar, there were good holds thanks to a vein of hard basalt. The rotten sandstone around this basalt would have been unclimbable. It ended up being a relatively fun, clean pitch of free climbing (5.6) to the true summit.

We descended via the large easternmost gully between the Altar of Sacrifice and Meridian Tower.

– Dan Stih