Hard by the city of Tucson, Arizona is a peak known locally as Table Tooth. Right next to it is its better-known neighbor called Table Mountain, which is a few hundred feet higher. Table Tooth sits in its shadow, and, although it is lower, it is steeper (thence the name “tooth”) and more difficult. Andy talked me into climbing it, so one late November day in 2011 we headed out. Out little group was comprised of Andy, his wife Sarah, a work friend named Ben, and myself.

It was late when we left the parking lot and started up the Pima Canyon trail – the sun had risen and it was already warming up. A few miles later, it was time to leave the relative comfort of the trail and start the bushwhacking. Ben decided he wanted no part of that, so he turned around and left just as the real fun was starting. The arrow shows the summit from near where we left the trail.

Thrashing our way up the slope for about 1,500 vertical feet, we arrived at a notch where sat a big tree. Leaving our packs, we continued up a steep, brushy area towards the summit. I was out front a ways, and everything was going well until I came to a spot where I was stumped.

A rock face rose steeply above me, and it looked too risky to try without being roped up. I couldn’t see any way around it, so I descended to where I met Andy and Sarah as they were climbing up. After telling them what I’d found, I told them that the proper route must be somewhere else. Regrettably, they believed me, so we all returned to our packs. The next hour was spent looking around the upper part of the mountain for a better route, to no avail. By then, it was getting on – we were disappointed after such an effort, to have to go home empty-handed. We bushwhacked our way back down the mountain to the canyon bottom where we picked up the trail once more. It was already late enough that we were fast losing the daylight. Before we knew it, we were donning our headlamps. Time seemed to drag after that – it always does for me when moving at night in the mountains.

After a couple of hours, we knew we were getting close to our vehicles because we could finally see the lights of the city below us – it was a relief to be almost done. As we were walking along, not a quarter mile from the parking lot, a strange thing happened. We heard a voice calling to us from the desert near the trail, a woman’s voice. “Please help me”, she called. She repeated her plea a few more times. It really took us by surprise – we didn’t know what to think, but we called back. When she responded, we shone our headlamps in that direction. There, we saw a young woman, tall and thin, standing completely naked about fifty feet off the trail.

What a shock to see her there! It was a cool evening, perhaps fifty degrees and cooling off quickly. She didn’t have a stitch of clothing on, not even shoes on her feet. Andy and I discretely averted our gaze while Sarah went over to her. She quickly learned the girl’s name and asked her how long she had been there. “Two nights” was the reply. That seemed unlikely, as the previous nights had seen 40-ish temperatures and it’s not likely she would have survived that in her present state of deshabille. The thing I found most shocking was the fact she was barefoot – the ground was littered with cactus spines and sharp thorns of every description. If I were to find myself suddenly barefoot in such a place, I wouldn’t even try to walk. Within moments your feet would be painfully punctured by all manner of sharp things. Sarah called to us, saying the girl seemed unhurt except for a huge scrape on her buttock. Upon further questioning, the girl said she had left a bad situation with some relatives and didn’t want to go back. Personally, I think drugs were involved.

Andy decided to go to his car and get Sarah’s running shoes and some spare clothes for the girl. I remained nearby and called 911, telling them to come to the Pima Canyon trailhead. I also relayed the girl’s name to the dispatcher. After some further communication, I told them I’d go down to the parking lot to meet them. By then I could see the flashing lights of several emergency vehicles. On my way down, I met Andy who was already on his way back up to Sarah with the clothing. Shortly, I arrived at the parking lot where I was greeted by several police cars and an ambulance. An officer told me that there was a missing persons report out on the girl. Before long, Andy and Sarah arrived with the girl, now clothed and shod. She was quickly loaded into the ambulance, hooked up to an IV and driven away. In the ensuing days, Sarah tried to learn more about the girl’s fate, to no avail.

Fast forward two years. Andy and I both wanted to return to Table Tooth, as it was a part of a list of peaks we needed to climb. Sarah didn’t want to come along this time, but Jake did. Armed with plenty of beta Andy had gathered , we set out from the parking lot much earlier – by headlamp this time. The miles passed, and once again we arrived at the spot where we needed to leave the trail. There was plenty of water running in the canyon bottom as Andy led us on the start of the bushwhack. It seemed to go a lot better than it did two years before, maybe because we knew the steep slopes better.

We made it to the notch with the tree and stashed some gear there. Another ten minutes took us up to the spot where I had chickened out two years prior.

It didn’t seem like there was really any other place to try. We looked at it skeptically. Jake offered to give it a go. He started up the steep short face and, after a few tricky moves (probably low Class 5), he scrambled past the crux and stood on top of the short face. That was encouraging – I offered to go next. There were a few bits of loose rock on the route, but otherwise it was just steep with marginal holds. Once I pulled myself over the top, I knew I didn’t want to downclimb it. Andy had brought a 20-foot length of 5 mm line, which I had with me. I tied it off to a tree and threw the other end down to him. He tried the same route but decided against it.

There had to be another way – a local hiking club came to the summit un-roped. Jake went down to another spot, while Andy explored over to the side. It looked like Andy’s route would go, and with Jake’s help he pulled up and over a bulge where they finally stood together. From there, it was a short scramble to the top of Jake’s earlier route.

All that was now left to do was scramble along an airy ridge of good granitic rock, albeit loose in places, to the summit a few hundred feet away. Here, Table Mountain is in the background on the left. Jake’s white hat can be seen part-way along our ridge on the right.

There, we found a  register with many entries and signed in. It was a pretty cool spot – kind of an eagle’s eyrie with huge drops on all sides.

We didn’t stay long, wanting to get back along the ridge and down.

Having decided to get off this thing by Andy’s route, we used our bit of rope for some psychological protection. It went without a hitch – actually, it was a good route Andy had discovered. Further research once back in front of a computer led us to conclude that Andy’s route was probably a more difficult variation of the route most people used. Jake’s route was likely not used by anyone – it was too difficult. I still regretted having blown our first attempt in 2011. Knowing Andy, if he had come up to our high point of that year, he’d probably have figured out a way up it where I had quailed.

Back at the tree, we enjoyed our lunch, then bushwhacked down to the trail below, picking up a few scars en route. We had started at 6:00 a.m., stood on top at 10:30 and were back down to the trail by 1:00 p.m. There was plenty of company on the walk back out, as the Pima Canyon Trail is very popular. On the way out, we passed a few of these metates in the granitic rock, where Native Americans ground corn long ago.

It felt like a long way out, but we finally re-gained our cars at 2:30 p.m.. A total time time of 8.5 hours, and not one naked girl this time around.

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