I’m surprised I’ve waited this long to devote an essay to what may well be my favorite type of climbing – namely, stealth climbing. First of all, let’s see if I can come up with some sort of a definition that we can use. Google had some pretty good ones that I like because they describe the concept of stealth quite well, at least I think so, so let’s try them. Here they are.

Stealth is defined as a secret, quiet or clever way of moving or behaving. Stealth means sneakiness. Stealth means slow, deliberate and secret in action or character. Stealth is movement that is quiet and careful in order not to be seen or heard.

I don’t think I can add anything to make those any better, and they all apply to stealth climbing very well. There are any number of circumstances that could turn an ordinary climb into a stealth climb, but one thing that all stealth climbs have in common is that you are going to a place that you are not allowed to be. By not allowed, that usually means that you are breaking somebody’s law in one way or another. Here are some examples:

1. You trespass on to someone’s private property without asking permission. Perhaps you need to cross a ranch, or an acreage, or even someone’s yard to get to your peak.

2. You sneak across a part of an Indian reservation to get to a peak. Or your peak may be within the boundaries of the reservation. Sometimes you can get a permit, but there may be restrictions as to which areas you are allowed to enter, even with the permit. Some reservations will never give you permission of any type.

3. You enter federal lands at a place or time when they are closed to the public. This could be a national park, seashore or monument, or a national wildlife refuge. Sometimes parts of these are off-limits, or are closed at certain times of the year.

4. You cross a border into another country without going through a proper port of entry. An example would be sneaking into Mexico to climb a peak, then crossing back into the USA.

5. The very best, the highest form of stealth that I personally know, is to sneak on to a military reservation to climb. These involve the greatest stealth, the greatest risk – not just the legal consequences if you’re caught, but the danger to life and limb from injury from exploding stuff already on the ground, and being in the path of bullets shot, bombs dropped and lasers fired. I’ll elaborate on all of this later.

6. Although I’ve never done anything like this, I can imagine that an extremely exciting type of stealth climbing would be to sneak into a country where entry was forbidden. Like sneaking into North Korea to climb their peaks, where you risked being killed by sharp-eyed soldiers who would shoot first and ask questions later. Wow, what a rush! I wonder if any of that has ever been done?

My first 20 years of climbing were done in southwestern British Columbia, and for the life of me I can’t recall any stealth climb that I did while there. Although there are a number of peaks that lie just south of the border into the US, and Canadian climbers regularly cross the border on foot to bag those peaks, somehow nobody ever thought of those as being stealth climbs. Perhaps it’s because the crossings are done out in the middle of nowhere where the US authorities either don’t care, or there are none of the usual sensors along the border to pick up on that cross-border movement. I did my share of those, but never gave it a second thought.

However, all that changed when I moved to Arizona in 1985. Doing what any good peakbagger would do, I started making lists of peaks to climb, and I soon learned that there were all kinds of inviting peaks out there for which access wasn’t so clear-cut. As time passed, I found myself stealthing my way through all of the first 5 categories listed above. I couldn’t help it – peaks on my lists required sneaking into all kinds of places where I knew I couldn’t get permission. Bless me Father, for I have sinned ……………

Take, for example, the first category – someone’s private property. A good example is the high point of the Animas Mountains in southwestern New Mexico. The 8,565-foot peak is surrounded by private ranch lands, yet dozens have sneaked in to the summit in spite of the blatant warning signs posted. Another one is Mohon Peak in Arizona. It too is surrounded by private ranch land, and they’ve never given permission to anyone to cross any of their land, necessitating a very long overland stealth. And here’s a good one – a house sits atop a peak in Tucson, and you have to sneak across their yard to tag the land upon which it sits.

The second category, sneaking on to Indian land, is one that has been much-abused by many of us. Some reservations will give limited access, but others will give none at all, and will even impose stiff legal penalties if they catch you on their land. I can’t blame them – after all, it is their own private land, and they are free to set up any rules they wish. There are 22 Indian reservations in Arizona alone, and those with peaks have all seen stealthing activity. Some are quite large – the Tohono O’odham nation, the size of Connecticut, boasts 401 peaks, all of which have been climbed. The Navajo nation, the size of West Virginia, has many peaks that are difficult of access, are off-limits and are highly technical climbs, so it has a number that have never been climbed.

The third category – hmmm, here’s a good example. For eleven years, all of the back country in the 516 square miles of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was closed to the public. It developed a reputation as “the most dangerous park in America” after ranger Kris Eggle was killed by cartel members. Even so, there were peaks waiting to be climbed, and climbed they were, by determined peakbaggers who couldn’t wait out the closure. Devious new approaches had to be used to avoid detection by law enforcement.

The fourth category – this is a good one. Sneaking into Mexico to climb a peak has been done many times, but the Border Patrol has been clamping down on this type of activity (not if you’re caught sneaking down, but rather sneaking back into the US). Nevertheless, it is still done. The list of The 193 Mountain Ranges of Arizona contains 5 peaks requiring a stealth into Mexico, but these are becoming dangerous and problematic. An added element of risk if climbing near the Mexican border is running into members of the drug cartels, who are themselves involved in one of the greatest cat-and-mouse games ever devised – trying to evade the Border Patrol, the military and other branches of law enforcement as they try to smuggle drugs and indocumentados into the US. Those cartel guys can be armed and may rob you, or worse.

Which brings me to the 5th category – sneaking on to military lands that are closed to the public. It’s almost hard to put into words the many things that make this the most exciting and rewarding type of stealth climbing. So much adrenaline, so much artful dodging, so much dumb luck – and yet, with careful planning ….. such rewards, the likes of which can’t be had in any other type of climbing.

A few years after I moved to Arizona, I found myself facing my first military stealth  – it was December of 1989, and I remember it well. It involved sneaking several miles across Army land on the Yuma Proving Ground to climb Mojave Peak. I soon learned that there were several other peaks on the Proving Ground that needed to be stealthed, as the Army didn’t give permission to enter most of their lands.

It was easy enough to nibble around the edges of these military preserves, to go in a short distance to snag a peak, a short dash there and back

Some were further in, though, and required more strategy. The Barry M. Goldwater Range was our Arizona epicenter of serious stealth activity. It consists of 1.9 million acres of relatively undisturbed Sonoran Desert between Yuma and Tucson, south of Interstate 8. Some parts of it can be accessed by a free permit issued by the military. A smaller part can be accessed by permission at certain times. That leaves the Tactical Area, the sanctum sanctorum where no access is ever given, permanently off-limits to all civilians. And that, Friends, is where all of the juiciest peaks are located. It is our equivalent of Nevada’s Area 51. Climbers have traditionally never gone into the Tactical Area because, quite frankly, they’ve been scared shitless to do so. I guess they’ve been afraid of getting blown up or arrested.

So what’s a stealth climber to do? Sneak in, of course, to partake of the forbidden fruit! About a dozen years ago, a couple of us made the serious decision to plan lengthy trips deep into the heart of the Tactical Area – we’d go in for an extended period of time so as many peaks as possible could be climbed in one trip. I mean, if we were taking the risk anyway ….. we might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. These trips involved planning out every detail: what route to use to sneak in; where to set up a camp out of which we could secretly operate for many days; how much food, water and everything else to bring in; what peaks we’d climb each day, and by what routes (even though nobody had ever climbed any of the peaks before); how to avoid the military every day. Actually, avoiding the military wasn’t too hard – quite frankly, we’d had so much experience with that that it wasn’t a major challenge for us. We knew a lot about their movements, when and where they traveled. We knew the best areas to travel undetected so as to not get spotted or caught, bombed or blown up.

Our first major military stealthing trip was in January of 2012 when we went into a part of the Barry M. Goldwater Range (let’s call it the BMG). Much to our surprise and delight, we found ourselves very close to a spot where jet aircraft dropped big bombs on to a hill used for target practice. We sat on a mountaintop only a mile and a half away and watched the kind of show that money can’t buy. Although we were only nibbling at the edges, we still managed to pick up a few really good peaks that had been avoided by other climbers.

There is an odd piece of the Yuma Proving Ground that wraps around the southeast corner of the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. It is only 6 miles wide by 18 miles long, and is pretty insignificant in the sense that it’s out in a remote part of the desert that is seldom visited. In early 2013, three of us stealthed our way in and climbed some dandy peaks in the northernmost part. No climbers had ever bothered with them before.

There are many roads in federal lands that can only be driven by government officials involved in law enforcement. In October of 2013, a federal government shutdown occurred. The Border Patrol wasn’t patrolling these back roads closed to the public like they usually do, so two of us seized the moment and drove all of those roads in a remote part of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. We climbed 13 peaks in the Agua Dulce Mountains by driving in close to them, something we’d never have been able to do had it not been for the government shutdown.

February of 2014 saw 2 of us heading into the Granite Mountains. There, we spent 9 grueling days climbing 19 peaks, walking 87 miles, climbing 20,000 vertical feet and at times laboring under 100-pound loads. We had to carry all our water, as the range has no supply of its own. The last several days saw us stealthing peaks at the north end of the range in the BMG. This was an area that was not open to the public, which made it all the more exciting.

In December of 2014, Paul and I stealthed our way into the Sand Tank Mountains. To the west of the range’s height-of-land, the slope drops off precipitously for 1,500 vertical feet. That was where we chose to climb, picking off at our leisure a total of 8 peaks that had never before been explored by climbers. It was a pristine spot, deep in the Tactical Area, and we had plenty of adventures. A nasty fall almost ended in disaster, and twice we were buzzed by law-enforcement helicopters. Those pilots were shocked to see us out there, as nobody had ever before dared to venture into that remote piece of desert to climb.

A year passed, and 2 of us decided to up the ante by pushing deep into the BMG into the Tactical Area in the Águila Mountains. The Border Patrol tracked us into the range and gave us quite a scare, but we all relaxed once they realized that we were just climbers out there having fun climbing 12 peaks never-before-visited by anyone. They wished us well and left quite unconcerned, and the next days saw us pushing up to 30 miles deep into the BMG, climbing with impunity.

December of 2016 saw us pushing the idea of stealth climbing to an outrageous level. We established a camp hidden deep within the Crater Range. What makes this range special is that it has plenty of military activity going on. We were actually spotted once by soldiers but managed to blend into the desert and get away without being caught. No less than 4 other times, we came close to being seen but always managed to elude the military. In a week of climbing 14 different peaks, we penetrated as much as 40 miles into the heart of the Tactical Area to pick off every mountain in the range. There were plenty of exciting moments as we negotiated our way through unexploded munitions like this.

One year later, we returned to that section of the Yuma Proving Ground that we visited back in 2013. We drove many miles of roads in the Tactical Area which were closed to the public, and managed to pick off 13 peaks that were previously untouched by climbers. This was a truly beautiful area and we felt privileged to be there. It was quiet and unspoiled, as there was no military activity going on at that time (between Christmas and New Year’s, a period we often used as things tended to be quieter then).

In late December of 2018, we embarked on what could have turned out to be our most ambitious stealth yet, into the Tactical Area of the Chocolate Mountains (once again on the Yuma Proving Ground). However, 8 peaks into the project, a climbing accident forced us to retreat, even relying on the Border Patrol for help in getting safely back out to civilization. Too bad we didn’t finish, as there were many more peaks and miles on the agenda.

Those classic years (2012 to 2018) of serious military stealths were the icing on the cake, that’s for sure. They formed an epic period of stealth climbing in Arizona, the likes of which hasn’t been repeated, a Golden Age if you will. Hell, we should be in some kind of climbers’ hall of fame for pulling off those stunts. It’s not likely others will go into those ranges to revisit any of those peaks because we’ve already made the first ascents. All of those trips have been written up on this website in great detail and with full embellishment, and you won’t be bored reading about any of them should you decide to do so.