Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

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 anyone 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 strange, 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. I opted to follow Jesse and Kyle up the trail approach so there’s little worth documenting. This is a long slog and they kept a good pace throughout. We did lose the trail a few times in the canyon but we were always able to find the trail after a little bit of backtracking. By the time we got to around 1400 m elevation underneath the objective the headlamps were finally turned off. Jesse’s idea was to attack the east ridge so we kept following the trail all the way to almost 1600 m elevation.

We then thrashed up the steep slope for about 100 m elevation towards one of the many low points on the east ridge of “Barrier Tooth” but we should have left the trail earlier to more or less go up the south face underneath the false summit. This was of course in retrospect as there was hardly any “beta” on the internet. The bonus for our route was to do the full east ridge traverse over at 2 or 3 technical towers so we wouldn’t complain. We soloed through some exposed 4th and low 5th class terrain before taking the rope out. The first pitch was straightforward but the exposure was lethal. There’s another tower that we bypassed on the north side on a chossy and exposed ledge, which we belayed across as well. It was then class 2/3 scrambling to the false summit where one Instagram party turned around.

The true summit indeed appeared technical and I agreed with the aforementioned party that the direct attack seemed like 5.7 climbing. I however, found an easier alternative by traversing left. The arete on the south side would be only “low 5th class”, but extremely exposed and not very protectable for the lead climber. Jesse led the direct finish in his boots whereas Kyle followed the corner variation. I changed to rock shoes and climbed the direct finish.

A 30m rope was more than sufficient for the rappel back down into the notch. I briefly went down northwards to check out the potential linking towards “Canine”, but with only one 30m rope I thought the descent would be too complicated. I then backtracked and we scrambled back up to the false summit. We spotted several rappel stations down the south face of the false summit so we went down that way, down-climbing past a few of them. The down-climb was more challenging than I thought but with careful route-finding I was able to find a way without having to pull the rope out. The down-climb past the final webbing was very tricky on chossy and down-sloping “holds”. The webbing got extended so it’s easier to just use that as a handline. There wasn’t a lot of bushwhacking to get back to the trail but the bushes were quite sticky so my pants got quite dirty.

The rest of the descent was uneventful but was a long ass slog. I again, opted to follow Jesse and Kyle so I didn’t have to do much mental work. I did check the GPS a few times and the reality was rather cruel every time I checked the screen. Our round trip time was 7.5 hours including everything. We then drove back to Jesse’s place, grabbed his wife Stephanie and went for a celebration lunch. I then hopped into Kyle’s vehicle for the 2-hour drive northwards to Phoenix. It’s much easier this way because Kyle would be driving northwards anyway. I eventually earned myself 2 hours of extra time to work in the airport before the midnight flight home.