When Andrew Burr returned from Zion National Park in 2007 with photos that revealed ice climbing in some of its far-flung sandstone canyons—and not just a little bit of ice, but multiple pitches soaring hundreds of feet—the climbing community was stunned by the improbability of frozen waterfalls hiding in the desert. But then Scott Adamson, Jesse Huey, Matt Tuttle, and Angela VanWiemeersch emerged from Zion in the winter of 2014 with first ascents of more than a dozen major routes, half of which were at least 400 feet, and the improbable was replaced with the seemingly impossible.
“No one has found a venue this big in North America since they invented the fuckin’ ice tool,” said alpinist Pete Takeda in the 2014 short film, Desert Ice.
Said Burr, “It was one of the greatest waterfall ice discoveries in generations.”
Burr wasn’t the first to climb Zion’s ice, but over the course of the last decade he and Adamson devoted themselves to see just how extensive the climbing
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