Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

March 3, 2026

697m

Phoenix, AZ

“Camel’s Head” is the unofficial name of the NW peak of Camelback Mtn. and boasts exactly 100 m prominence above the saddle between it and the main peak. I had hiked the main peak of Camelback Mtn. 9 years ago in the spring break. There’s no tourist’s way up the head that even the easiest route (Padrick’s Chimney) is rated 5.2 and I think it’s sandbagged. The Praying Monk is officially named, but is just a rock tower on the north slope of “Camel’s Head”. It’s a one-pitch climb rated at 5.6 so the tower boasts at most 20 m prominence (and hence not a ranked peak). I had been looking to do something short on the first day of this trip as my flight was supposed to arrive at 2:30 pm. The sunset would be at 6:30 pm so I thew out the suggestion to Caspar and Erica, and not to my surprise they were game. Erica was already in the area and Caspar’s flight would arrive 2 hours earlier than mine.

I woke up at 4 am for the connecting flights to Phoenix with a layover in San Francisco. The flights weren’t delayed and Caspar also arrived according to plan. The car was already there by the time I got my luggage, so we drove straight towards Echo Canyon trail-head to prepare for the late-afternoon ascents. Due to the time constraint I didn’t want to mess things around in the city so I got enough water in the airport, and my partners bought me a burrito.

The approach was as short as we could possibly imagine. As someone living in the NW I thought this was absurd. In less than a kilometer and just over 100 m elevation gain we were at the base of the “approach pitch”. The easiest way up the lower headwall underneath The Praying Monk is rated “4th class” and is advertised as “the walk up”. I thought this was nowhere a walk-up, but is indeed easier than any other alternative. The rock formation is mostly volcanic conglomerate but due to the amount of traffics the rock quality was way better than appeared. We hardly encountered any loose rock on this long pitch of 4th class. The climbing was quite sustained and definitely exposed, so most “scramblers” would want a belay on this pitch except for the most competent. We all soloed it without a problem.

We then wrapped around the NE side of The Praying Monk underneath the east face’s climbing route. There’s some unofficial trails leading to the base of the Padrick’s Chimney. Again, the pitch appeared much harder than 5.2 so we decided to properly pitch it out. We all soloed the lower half to directly underneath the chimney, and even this section felt trickier than expected thank to the down-sloping nature and the lack of holds. Caspar essentially soloed the chimney while trailing the rope up, and Erica and I followed afterwards. We all got up through the crux bulge in different ways. The moves I did were nowhere near the 5.2 range but maybe that’s just because I’m not used to the chimneys nor the desert rock formation. In any case there’s no way for us to down-climb this pitch so we left the rope fixed for the rappel, and resumed the scramble to the summit. There’s some route-finding involved but the route was mostly straightforward. There’s actually a cool arch feature on the very top of this peak.

A short while later we scrambled back to the top of the chimney, and made a single rappel all the way down to the bottom of it. We then relocated ourselves to the base of the Praying Monk’s east face. There are two ways to start it up and we opted for the easier option through the cave feature onto a hidden ledge. It’s all scrambling up to that point. The pitch itself was definitely climbing and I felt the 5.6 grade was adequate. All of the moves were face climbing on conglomerate or what I would call the chocolates sticking out of the cookie, but believe it or not the rock quality was actually quite solid. We also bumped into Aaron Collins who’s the founder of “Arizona Mountain Guides” which I followed on Instagram. I thought that was quite cool. Aaron was leading his girlfriend up behind us. The three of us then made an overhanging rappel using the 60m rope down the north side of the tower.

It seems like we definitely wouldn’t need the headlamps but we still wanted to hurry up. It was a bit difficult to locate the “approach pitch” from above, but after some messing around we found an eye-bolt anchor and made a rappel down the lower wall. We didn’t rappel the exact same way that we had come up from, but that’s okay. We then leisurely walked back to the vehicle and then drove to Caspar’s uncle’s place in Paradise Valley underneath Mummy Mtn.