Arizona Summits: Golden Gate Mountain (4,288′)

Sunrise on Golden Gate Mnt Summit, #3. Tucson Mountains, 2015

Sunrise on Golden Gate Mountain Summit, #3. Tucson Mountains, 2015

Have 2-3 hours to spare whilst in the Old Pueblo? Here is a fun one…

Drive west on Speedway, into the Tucson Mountains, and over Gates Pass. Drop down the west side of Gates Pass about a half mile and turn in to the paved parking lot at the David Yetman West Trailhead.

From your parked machine, hike roughly south on the roughly obvious, rough, old road/trail for nearly a half mile to a low pass where several trails intersect (signed). Continue straight through and downhill another 200 yards or so until you see the cairns on the right side. Start threading your way through the cat claw and cacti up the slope of Golden Gate Mountain at this point.

The photos below will add some visual cues to this description.

The path up to the summit is lightly cairned and somewhat intermittent, so dust off the route-finding hill skills. Mainly, you’ll just stay in the main arroyo in which you started until nearing the upper section. Somewhere up there, you’ll cross over a sort of ridge or shoulder to the northwest, and then on up to a grassy “flat”. From the grassy area it is a hop, skip, and scramble to the airy, rocky, top.

This morning, I climbed by the light of a 96% waning Moon with first light coming on as I neared the summit. The winds were ferocious by Tucson high desert standards–maybe 20-30mph gusts. I was almost wishing for ski goggles.

The only thing I carried, though, was my fixed-lens Fuji X100s camera–no tripod or heavy DSLR on this trip…sort of an experiment. Once up there, and witnessing the dawn’s beautiful light display, I did find myself wishing for my full kit of 36 megapixels, three lenses and tripod–but you do what you can with the tool at hand.

And that was really the point of the exercise–to force myself to “see” and make images with a simpler, lighter, and less capable camera to find out what might happen creatively within my little right-brain grey cells.

Nor did I carry water or a pack of any kind. In cool weather, with a mere one hour twenty minutes up and fifty minutes back, it was a very quick journey, all within screaming-for-help distance of un-civilization and the human beans and their Otto-mobiles commuting over Gates Pass to work in the metropolis.

Some selected images…