Elevation Gain: 1,187m
Distance: 15.13km
Total Time: 5 hours 34 minutes
Date: September 5th, 2024
I happened to be in Tucson, Arizona for a 4 day work conference/retreat and I was excited to see to if I could squeeze in a short trip up one of the nearby mountains. By some luck, the hotel I was at was just 3 or 4km south of the Pusch Ridge Wildnerness and the southern end of the Catalina Mountains. The area has a number of well established and maintained trails and I was poring over the options. I found a number of named points along the ridge/canyon systems from the nearest trailhead, but I had to look all the way up to Mount Kimball to find the first real summit within reasonable distance. This looked like a perfect outing and from what I read there would be some amazing views. I’d have to start at 2 or 3am to make it back in time for the days events, but I thought it was doable. One of my coworkers, Wei, caught wind of this plan and was keen to join as well. I thought having some company might be nice as the desert terrain is not my usual hiking grounds. Many of the reports aired caution about rattle snakes, so we were both ready to be on the look out.
The night before I headed to bed as early as humanly possible, but woke up every hour thinking I’d missed my alarm anyways. There’s no way to explain the disappointment of lucidly witnessing your alarm go off at 2:30am instead of sleeping prior. I met Wei in the lobby and to my surprise he had arranged an Uber for us to the trail head. I never even considered the idea because I don’t have Uber and didn’t think anyone would be around at 3am in Tucson. That short ride saved us at least 45 minutes to an hour so it worked out perfectly.
We located the start of the trail head easily and navigated through the “cacti forest” by headlamp. Just before the trail steepened we ran right into a coiled up rattlesnake on the trail. It didn’t seem bothered in the least, so we just skirted around the left and continued on. The trail was quite easy to follow save for one or two encroached sections below the Linda Vista saddle and the head lamps finally came off just below the junction with Pima Canyon Trail. We veered left here and then it was a short walk up to the summit.
By now we were getting the early morning light over Tucson and it was breath taking. With light illuminating the canyons and ridges I could now see the broken granite towers that dotted the skyline and different elevation based biomes we had walked through. I can see why this would be one of the most popular trails. I can also say that, while we travelled by night out of necessity, it was still almost 26 degrees… I can’t imagine doing this summit in the daytime.
We finished up a few snacks and then hit the trail again as there’s only a few hours until the events start and most importantly… breakfast ends. Returning under the morning light was much easier and we even ran into a few people just starting up. It took us about 2.5 hours to get back and then Wei kindly set up another Uber to get us to breakfast in time. We rolled in just a few minutes before they wrapped everything up. An all around success!
