Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

March 5, 2026

876m

Phoenix, AZ

Courthouse Rock is not a major summit by any measure but is surely an iconic monolith sticking out of the desert floor in the Eagletail Mountains about halfway between Phoenix and Quartzite. The easiest route involves about half a dozen pitches of technical climbing but most of the pitches are “glorified scrambling” for seasoned mountaineers. The crux pitch however, is real climbing on face/slabs and goes at “mid 5th class”. The route-finding is also challenging and so is the drive to the starting point. Originally I thought Erica, Caspar and I would have a mid-sized AWD SUV but the vehicle got downgraded to a Sedan at the last minute. I had worries about the access and I was definitely correct. The drive turned out to be more adventurous than the climb itself, but more on that later.

Earlier in the day Caspar and I had climbed Weavers Needle and the plan was to car-camp at the base of Courthouse Rock. We grabbed some supplies in the city of Phoenix and then drove west for about an hour. For the driving direction we too used this excellent source just like the other peak-baggers. The web author even uploaded a driving GPX to the peakbagger.com database which was more than convenient enough for us. The drive involved at least 30 km of dirt roads each way but only the final 5 km was tough. The spur road wasn’t even labelled on the Gaia GPS map so having the GPX file was definitely handy. If not because of Erica’s knee injury we would have just parked earlier and walked the extra kilometers but we were determined to drive as far as possible to shorten the approach distance. Needless to say this turned out to be quite a bold decision but Caspar had lots of experience in off-roading, and we did drive to within 500 m from the starting point without putting too much damage to the vehicle. The night was peaceful with a full moon rising behind our tents. It was bright enough that we didn’t even need to use the head-lamps.

We all woke up once the sunray got on our faces and within an hour we took down the tents and started the day. I did take my time cooking a ramen breakfast with some Indian curries. The approach from this point to the base of the route took about 20 minutes but there wasn’t really a trail until the final rise to the headwall. Seeing the route we decided spontaneously to “scramble” for as much as possible, as the route seemed to be mostly on low-angled terrain. There were a few harder moves not far from the start but the first pitch was mostly “low 5th class”. The second and the third pitches were actually easier so we got to the base of the crux pitch in literally no time. The crux did appear interesting so we properly pitched it out with Caspar leading and mostly running it out. There were a few bolts to clip in, and the last one did create some drags like mentioned on the other trip reports. Caspar led a traversing like to climber’s left into what some sources referred as the “chossy bowl”. We didn’t find a bolted anchor but there’s one big boulder for belaying. I wouldn’t agree with the “chossy” status. There sure had a few loose pieces but those who claimed this peak “chossy” had surely never climbed anything in the Canadian Rockies. From this sling boulder the final pitch was only class 3/4 scrambling to the plateau above. This way we had also skipped the “pitch 5” on the lower headwall.

We left one of the 60m ropes behind as the reason to bring two 60m ropes was solely for the double-length rappels down this lower headwall. The scrambling portion of the upper route was longer than I thought with some cross-country travel on the typical desert terrain. There were lots of chollas and Caspar got at least one or two on various parts of himself. Higher up we correctly located the 5th class chimney to get onto the west ridge and since we had the rope we decided to pitch that one out as well. The chimney itself was not hard, but I felt the finishing moves to the two-bolt anchor being quite tricky. Caspar surely didn’t lead the easiest way up. The fact I climbed this pitch with a Nanotraction device as self-belay meant it was hard to give myself slacks, so I was essentially stuck. After evaluating the options I made the decision to unclip, down-climbed a few meters and scrambled across an exposed but easy ledge system to finish this pitch off. The summit block appeared daunting but was mostly 3rd class scrambling, so we just scrambled it.

On the descent we down-scrambled the west ridge and made a single rappel using the one 60m rope down the upper chimney pitch. We weren’t sure if one rope was enough to get down but it turned out that we did get down, but with no spare whatsoever. The traverse back to the top of the lower headwall then took a while and so was the descent off the headwall using double 60m ropes. Rappelling the crux pitch was fun but the next rappel was on some extremely low-angled terrain. After Caspar starting the descent with so much rope tangling Erica and I simply decided to down-climb while sorting the ropes out. We didn’t need to rappel class 4 terrain, after all. All of us rappelled the bottom pitch and we eventually finished the round trip in exactly 5 hours. The drive-out wasn’t nearly as hard as the drive-in as we already knew the devils, and after a major Mexican lunch we drove a couple hours northwards.