Arizona Summits: Cat Mountain (3,852′)

Yet another short-but-fun outing…maybe three miles round trip and 1200′ vertical in total from the parking lot at the end of Sarasota Boulevard. What a pretty crag! If you have ever driven west out of Tucson on Ajo Way, you have surely admired it.

Once again, I carried only the Fuji X100s and no tripod. So all photographs were with a 35mm equivalent fixed lens and hand-held (or braced on a rock).

Here is a portrait of the west side of the peak made from a viewpoint somewhere along South Kinney Road (the traffic whizzing along just behind my butt).

Cat Mountain Portrait. Tucson Mountains, Arizona, 2015

From the Sarasota Boulevard trailhead, you can climb either the east or west flanks of this prominence, but the idea is to eventually gain the summit ridge. From there, it is a fun scramble to the top–some of it Class 2 (or higher if you stray).

With either option, once you leave the main hiking trail, and start up the peak itself, you’ll be doing some lightweight bushwhacking, and following intermittent trail sections and half-assed cairns. I refuse to give you a better route description so you can have some adventure, too!

Here are some color images from the summit area…

Note the bizarre white “rock” which is actually a human construction that houses some sort of weird repeater used by the National Security Agency to spy on all of us. (Just kidding…I think.) The peak on the right is Golden Gate Mountain, subject of Wednesday’s blog post:

Cat Mountain Summit, #1. Tucson, Arizona, 2015

A slight shift in perspective revealed some graffiti that had me wondering if I needed to take extra care on the down scramble back to the car. I hoped it wasn’t an omen:

Danny Fell Here. Cat Mountain, Arizona, 2015

The Tucson metropolis with the Santa Catalina Mountains (Mt. Lemmon) in the background:

Tucson and the Santa Catalinas. From Cat Mountain, Arizona, 2015

That is Ajo Highway leading off toward Kitt Peak. You can just barely make out some of the white observatory buildings reflecting the morning sun. Baboquivari Peak is in the distance just left of center–a southern Arizona attraction for many climbers: