[1] Mount Temple is situated immediately northeast of Pinnacle Mountain, with Sentinel Pass as the low point between the two.

These, crowning the summits of ridges and slopes with ever changing angles, as though they represented alternating walls and roofs of some great cathedral, all contributed to give this mountain, with its elegant contours and outlines, the most artistically perfect assemblage of forms that nature can offer throughout the range of mountain architecture.

On the north side of this mountain, as though, here, nature had striven to outdo herself, there rose from the middle slopes a number of graceful spires or pinnacles, perhaps 200 or 300 feet in height, slender and tapering, which, having escaped the irresistible force of moving glaciers and destructive earthquakes, through the duration of thousands of years, while the elements continued their slow but constant work of disintegration and dissolution, now presented these strange monuments of an ageless past."

Three previous attempts had been unsuccessful before the first ascent was made in 1909 by J. W. A. Hickson, with Edward Feuz Jr. and Rudolph Aemmer as guides.

This quartzite tower rises 120 metres above the scree slopes on the Paradise Valley side of Sentinel Pass.