Elephant's Trunk Route on Elephant Dome Mendoza Canyon Arizona

Wednesday I flew back in from spending Christmas with family in Texas and after two grueling days of life in civilization I was ready to get out again.  Fortunately that following weekend was a three day work holiday thanks to New Years and after some slightly harried planning I settled on a return to the Tucson area.

A few years back Jen Blackie, Jeff Atijera, and I did a New Years trip out there that had included caving, technical climbing, and even a facial assault by a skunk.  It was awesome except for that last part and the shots Jeff had to get to his face.  Beyond that the only other bummer was that we weren't able to summit Elephant Head due to route finding issues and an extended attempt to make something marginal work so I'd always wanted to go back.

Also since it's -ish in the area I wanted to add in one of the technical routes on Baboquivari since I'd heard it was an amazing climb.  Unfortunately due to the painfully long drives involved it's difficult to combine those two effectively with limited vacation days.

In the end we settled on driving out Friday night, not getting a lot of sleep, climbing Elephant's Dome on Saturday since it should have been an easier day, doing Baboquivari from the east the following day, and then if everything went well setting up for Elephant Head Sunday followed by a long drive home.  And hopefully not getting attacked by any skunks or drug runners.

It was an aggressive plan and things started going wrong also immediately when Kristen Lindbergh had to drop out due to some issued likely related to her unfortunate habit of consuming the flesh of innocent fish leaving just Jen and I leaving Friday night.

We had picked Elephant Dome for a warmup because it seemed like a relatively short day and had a fun looking multi pitch route called Elephant's Trunk rated as 5.7.  Information on this climb can be found at Mountain Project or the Bob Kerry's Backcountry Rockclimbing in Southern Arizona which climbaz.com has nicely made available online.

The drive Friday night was brutal.  I was exhausted from the quick turnaround following my Texas trip and getting out to this area of Arizona from Orange County is painful.  We left at 6:30 pm PST and arrived at the trailhead at 4 am MST.


Needless to say the morning was a little rough even though we didn't start hiking until 9:45 am local time.

The drive in to the trailhead passes through the King's Anvil Ranch.  There's a permit box along the way that asks you to sign in and provides a ranch access tag.  (According to the signs you might also need a State Land Trust permit but those are a bloody pain to get)  We eventually ended up at a fence that said foot traffic only and parked here.



There was another road a bit further south that looked like it might allow access further into Mendoza Canyon I'd try that if I was out here again.  From the climb it looked like there were fresh tire tracks that way and it would have cut off most of the cross country approach.

We could see the dome from where we parked.  The peakbagger in my was a little sad it wasn't one of the higher rocks on the mountain range but it still looked rather neat.


We started at the end of the trunk, climbed the yellow line along the ridge, and came down the green line.  The higher dome to the right is Middle Dome which we didn't have enough daylight to attempt.


The approach ended up being a bit less pleasant than we anticipated.  After passing the fence we followed an old road a short distance then set off cross country following occasional ducks.  In hindsight it would have been better to locate one of the more established roads or trails since the brush out there seems to have a high occurrence of thorns.


We aimed for the far end of the trunk where we could see scrambly terrain and planned to rope up whenever we felt the need.



We went a short distance up the trunk and roped up around 11:30 am.  For a rack we had 0, 1, and 2 Metolius C3s, .5 - 3 BD C4s with dupes of 1 and 2, green and yellow link cams, and a nut set along with an assortment of slings and draws.  We found that small gear was the most useful and could have used a few more of those pieces but we had plenty.


I led lower part of the trunk.  It was easy fun climbing and mostly a low angle.


After that there was a flat scramble section.  We stayed roped just so we wouldn't have to coil and flake the rope and that took us to a second fun yet easy -ish section.


That brought us to the base of the dome itself where the climbing became more vertical and a bit more challenging.  We did a few pitches here and found a pair of bolts along the way but not where described by the Kerry guide.  Someone appeared to have bailed off here because we found some green webbing and a carabiner left behind.

Jen leading the chimney pitch

The hardest thing we came across in this section was a crack on the left side of the ridge that required some awkward moves to get up.  Jen managed it better than I did.


After that I tried to lead the section above.  There was loose rock on the lower part and then about where I'm shown in the picture above the route follows a crack using what the Kerry guide describes as a friable flake.

The holds weren't too bad but slapping the flake causes the entire thing I was holding on to and standing on to shudder in a rather unpleasant manner.  The top of the flake required a bit of a lieback that was out to pull the flake away from the rock.  And as an added bonus the best placements are all beneath said flake and so would be compromised if it blew.  I got a small Metolius purple into a crack to the left and tested the moves required a few times before electing to back off and let Jen have a go at it.  She confirmed it was all crap and then went up it. 


The last pitch was easy low 5th climbing.  Jen elected to put a piece or two in once she got higher up and looked down but it was low enough angle we really could have unroped and scrambled.


From there we switched our climbing shoes for boots (to our great relief as both of our feet were killing us) and walked a short distance to the summit proper.  We made the summit at 3:49 pm and found a rather popular register going back a few decades.



Again the peakbagger in me was tempted by the fact Middle Dome was right there but we were running out of daylight and the descriptions of the rappel route made it sound like we might have to do some hunting to find the stations.


We found the first set of bolts on the far side of the saddle.


You can just make out Jen's new neon pink rope on the first rappel.  We probably could have down climbed a bit to climbers right instead but that looked like an unpleasant bushwhack and we we didn't see any reason not to rap off.


Below that we wasted a little time running around in the bushes looking for another rappel station.  There was a large slab to skiers right and someone had rapped down that at some point based on some old webbing I found but our 70m wasn't near long enough to make it down.  Skiers left was an easy scramble down and we found the next rap station at the base of the smooth rock cliffs near the bottom.


We located the second rap station easy enough and found green webbing that matched what we'd found on the bolt along the trunk.  I went down first being careful to look around since the guides say the third rap station can be tricky.  Sure enough I ended up going past it and wasted time looking to climbers right when I should have gone slight to climbers left of the fall line from the second station.


Looking up from the third station while Jen is at the second.


There was a fourth set of bolts at a lower ledge which brought us to the ground.  -ish.  We made it down the last rappel just after dark and picked our way down an unfortunate amount of dead slick grass which caused more than one minor tumble on the way down and again the thorny vegetation.  We were very happy to rejoined the old road closer to the car.


We made it back to the Jeep at 6:50 pm and debated whether we wanted to relocate over to the eastern approach to Baboquivari.  We knew the trailhead was private but didn't have any information about camping options before that.  In the end we elected to just stay here and drive over in the morning.  We enjoyed a well deserved meal of turkey burritos and red wine before crashing.

Next up, the Baboquivari bushwhack from hell!