Best of Tucson 1996: Best Rock Climbing

Best Rock Climbing

Mount Lemmon

READERS' PICK: Mount Lemmon, one of the highest peaks in the Santa Catalina Mountains, offers more walls, faces and boulders to climb than you can shake a belay rope at. Perhaps that's why you voted for the vast mountain in general, rather than any single climb. Unfortunately, we really don't know where to begin to extol its virtues. There are hundreds of established climbs of varying pitch and difficulty, a separate world of alpine forest and granite. See the Windy Point capsule below for details.

READERS' POLL RUNNER-UP: Readers who climb, you know who you are; and if you know that you climb, you probably know where Mount Lemmon is, there to the north, just an hour away by speeding vehicle. And if you know anything at all about us, The Weekly staff, you probably know the closest we get to climbing rocks is sidling up to the bar and ordering a cocktail in a highball glass. Surely there's nothing we can tell you about Windy Point East that you don't already know, in much greater detail than we could ever invent. For some real information on the myriad climbs along this short stretch of granite just past milepost 14 on Mt. Lemmon Highway, consult Squeezing the Lemmon: A Rock Climbers Guide to the Mount Lemmon Highway, by local author Eric Fazio-Rhicard, who, as far as we know, is far more credible and does not drink to excess. He'll tell you about all the best places to hang over traffic--climbs with campy names like Nickel Puppies (a 5.9 crack), Physical Therapy, Bubble Nutz, Arizona Flyways, Lizard Marmalade Direct and the Grand Illusion, all of which fall in the 5.10+ range of difficulty.