In early April, I got an email from my climber friend Andy Martin. He informed me that three guys named Scott were planning a trip into the Santa Teresa Mountains to climb a big mountain called Pinnacle Ridge, and was I interested. “You betcha!”, I wrote back. The thing is, I had gone in there around New Year’s and had got my butt kicked. I spent four hours driving from Tucson and reached a point on the final stretch of rough road that was covered in ice. For sure, if I had driven down that steep icy hill, I knew I wasn’t coming back up it, even in 4WD. It was late in the day, so I turned around and spent a night nearby, freezing my ass off in my truck when it dropped down to 19 degrees. So now, I figured that being a part of a group could only help.

The appointed day arrived, and I made the long drive back to the area of the peak, stopping en route at the Mickey D’s in Willcox. Needed a fix of their fries before brutalizing myself on the mountain. Still arriving well in advance of the agreed-upon hour, I had time to climb a nearby summit, so I did a lazy stroll to the top of Peak 5340.

I could see our agreed-upon meeting place from there, and knew that nobody had arrived yet. Anyway, I made my way to the road junction and hunkered down to wait. As the afternoon passed, I became concerned that we were burning too much daylight. There was some rough road to be driven to get to our trail-head, so I tied a note to a signpost in the hope that the guys would find it, then left for the mountain.

An hour later, I had thrashed my truck in to a pass at almost 5,800 feet in an uplift called Blue Ridge. I started to drive down one last hill, but did a double-take when I saw how steep it was, and ended up backing up to the only spot wide enough to park for the night. Even that was so steep, I blocked all four tires with big rocks to help prevent rolling in the night.

The next morning, way too long after first light, I was getting my pack ready for the climb when up the road comes a group of six guys. What a relief – I wouldn’t have to do this alone! Here was a collection of climbers you don’t get a chance to be with every day –  Scott  Surgent, Scott Peavy, Scott Kelley, Rick Hartman, Ken Jones and Dennis Poulin. I hadn’t met any of them before, but their reputations preceded them. This was gonna be a good day.

The first thing we did was to walk down the steep hill to the end of the road, losing a few hundred feet, to something called Devil’s Hole. Sitting in the middle of that was Devil Tank, an almost-dry man-made watering-hole for cattle.

Legend has it that a trail starts from here and goes up to the top of Pinnacle Ridge. We couldn’t find it, so we made our way past the tank and headed northeast towards a saddle. It was pretty open country, and we quickly gained eight hundred vertical feet to arrive at a flat area on a ridge. It had been a cakewalk up to here.

The map showed a level half-mile ahead of us, which was promising, but then again it looked like a thick tangle of brush. Even worse, it looked like manzanita. To the un-initiated, this is a shrub with twisted red branches that are sharp and springy. You have to push your way through it, but it will push back. Just plain nasty, and feared by all. I’m not sure, but that might be what convinced Scott Surgent and Ken Jones to turn back. They had lingered a bit, then hollered to us that they weren’t going to the top and they would see us later.

We tried to find lanes through the stuff. Much of the time, we were successful, but as we headed farther into the bush it got worse. If you stopped, you could hear the sound of the others crashing through the manzanita, snapping branches as they went, muttering under their breath, sometimes swearing loudly. As time passed, we became resigned to the fact that there was no easy way to do this. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it really sucked.

At one point, I came upon two of the guys discussing a snake they had just met. Turns out it was an Arizona black rattlesnake, two to three feet long. It was rattling away, warning them to keep their distance. This is one of our most dangerous snakes, capable of administering a large dose of deadly venom. We all gave it a wide berth.

The next part of the climb involved an ascending traverse across another four hundred vertical feet, through a mix of nasty brush and cliffs. That done, we had gained the summit ridge. If a trail had ever existed, we should have found it here. We looked hard for it, but found nothing that looked like a trail, and I’ve got as good an imagination as the next guy.

The ridge became quite steep in places, and we had to do a lot of scrambling on good rock.

From below, we made a decision to try to climb up a brushy ramp. It took a lot of fooling around, but it worked and took us up to the highest part of the mountain.

Scott Kelley started looking around for the highest point. He scampered up a pinnacle that was right beside us and quickly determined that the next one over looked to be the one we wanted. Since none of us had ever been here before, we were going on beta gleaned from previous ascenders. The best we had was from Andy Martin – he remembered a route that went up the northwest side of the highest pinnacle.

We started looking around, playing with different possible routes. Everything we tried ended up being dead-ends, and we were becoming frustrated. Time was passing by, and although we weren’t in trouble yet, time-wise, every one of us was determined to not go home empty-handed. One of the guys suggested going farther west to another pinnacle, perhaps four hundred feet away, where we could sit and get a good view and try to plan a route. Plenty of others had been here before us and summitted, so we knew there was a way up that wasn’t too hard – we just weren’t seeing it yet.

From that vantage point, we narrowed the possibilities down to just one – it had to work! So, back over to our chosen pinnacle we went. Scott Kelley was the boldest among us, and he led the way. From a large dying pine tree, he worked along some rocks and came to a rock ramp.

Up the ramp he went and came to the skyline, where he quickly disappeared. After a few minutes, we heard him shouting down to us that he had in fact found the route and was standing on the summit..

The rest of us huddled at the base of the steep ramp. One by one, we scrambled up to the skyline, looked over, and saw that, lo and behold, it continued. What we now saw was an improbable set of huge boulders, perched somehow on the east side of the pinnacle.

We squeezed through tight gaps, then had to climb up a steep boulder using mostly friction.

There was room on the narrow summit for all of us, but just barely. We found a register and signed in, but didn’t linger. It was noon, and reaching the top had taken us about five hours.

How difficult was the climb? The final scramble to the top certainly met all the criteria for Class 3, but was it more than that? The old-school definition of Class 4 climbing is something like this: footholds and handholds would be used; prudent parties would rope up; an unprotected fall would probably result in death. These final moves on Pinnacle Ridge were not too technically difficult. It would have been hard to place protection, so, hard to rope up. However, especially on the final moves, the exposure was very great and certainly a fall would have been fatal.

We retraced our steps and safely down-climbed to easier ground, thence down the steep summit ridge to a shady spot where we stopped for a proper lunch.

It felt good that we had found the route and all summitted. Dennis was fighting off leg cramps, so we needed to pace ourselves during the long descent. One final decision, and it was a big one, was which route to take to leave the high country and drop 2,000 vertical feet to Devil Tank. Our ascent route was a known quantity – if we descended that same way, at least we knew exactly what to expect. Or, hoping against hope, we could simply head straight downslope and pray for the best. The latter choice won, so we sealed our fate and thrashed our way downhill. There were some spots that stopped us completely – the brush was so thick we couldn’t move forward at all, causing us to abruptly change direction. Several cliff bands and a bee’s nest in a tree trunk kept things interesting on the way down. At long last, we reached the tank and called it good. Scott Peavy had worn a T-shirt for the entire day, and his arms were a bloody mess. He looked like he had been attacked by rabid badgers.

One more thing – we still had to climb couple of hundred feet out of Devil’s Hole to reach my truck. It felt like Heartbreak Hill, for sure. My truck was parked at the top, and I gave Dennis a ride down to his truck, a mile or more away down the road. The other guys walked out.

After I dropped him off, I cracked open a cold one, then continued driving for several more miles to the main camp where Scott Surgent, Ken Jones and Dean Molen were waiting. Scott and Ken said they’d descended to Devil Tank after they left us in the morning and spent a full two hours searching for any sign of a trail up the mountain but found none. You’d have a hard time convincing any of us there’s still a trail there today. Anyhoo, we took some photos and I took my leave of this fine group. Three hours later, I was back in Tucson, licking my wounds and glad to be done with this one.

There are 14 photos in this story. Photos 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10,11,12 and 13 are used with the kind permission of Scott Peavy.

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