“Barrier Tooth”

March 8, 2026

1827m

Tucson, AZ

“Barrier Tooth” is the unofficial name of the easternmost of the 4 “Wolverine Teeth” that stretches from Table Mountain towards Pima Saddle in Santa Catalina Mountains. These peaks are among some of the more obscured objectives even among local climbers based in Tucson, and the only reason I did it was because I teamed up with the Arizonian climbers Jesse and Kyle, whom were recommended by Matthias. I did two peaks with Matthias in the previous day and he suggested me to team up with Jesse J. who’s a much better technical climber living in Tucson area. Of course when I joined some local die-hard’s trips the objectives often turned out to be obscured. In this case there’s no detailed beta beside knowing a bunch of scramblers tried it and failed. The true summit likely requires technical climbing so we would bring a rope with a light rack just in case.

There’s a complication that I wouldn’t be having a vehicle for the last day of this trip, and Jesse and Kyle’s driving direction also didn’t make sense for grabbing me. I eventually decided to get dropped off at Pima Canyon trail-head by Erica in the previous evening and spent the night there alone camping in my tent. Of course camping on a public trail-head like this is illegal but I couldn’t care. Luckily for me there’s a massive bulldozer so I simply pitched my tent behind it. Unless someone searched the entire lot looking for illegal campers I wouldn’t be spotted by anything in that spot. It’s been a while since I did a stealth camp and it’s honestly quite fun. The plan was to start hiking at 4:30 am since the approach was long and I needed to be in Phoenix no later than 5 pm for my flight back home.

Kyle and Jesse’s phones were messed up by the time change which I thought was ridiculous, as there’s actually no time change in the state of Arizona. They ended up waking up an hour earlier but my phone didn’t get messed up so I still needed some time for breakfast and packing. I was able to rush the morning routine through so we started a little bit earlier than planned.