Courthouse Rock

Courthouse Rock 2874′
Rock Climbing
Total Time: 12:30
Distance: 3.8 miles
Elevation Gain: 2000′
Crux: 5.5
Pitches: 7
Companions: Holly, Colin Pickles, Alex Wallace
Trailhead: Eagletail Mountains Wilderness, no services

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The Eagletail Mountains are a rugged and remote range in Central Arizona between Phoenix and Quartzite. The range is named for its’ highest mountain, the technical Eagletail Peak with twin summit spires looking like a pair of namesake Eagle Feathers. The infrequently visited range and wilderness area has a few other technical summits, with the most popular by far being Courthouse Rock. I had first noticed Courthouse Rock on my move from California to Phoenix, the massive blocky summit dominating the open desert south of the I-10. The easiest route to the summit is 5.5 and at least 6 pitches, and it had been on my to do list longer than any other summit in the state. And to celebrate my final night call at Mayo Clinic, we were finally going to make it happen. With 6 pitches of climbing and a lot of scrambling mixed in, we wanted to optimize our daylight and left North Phoenix around 5:30 AM, meeting Colin off the I-10 shortly after 6. We drove in darkness east, stopping at a rest stop about 20 miles before our exit on to Salome Road. We used the excellent driving instructions from the Dankat trip report, the sun rising behind us and illuminating the impressive blocky summit in the middle of the desert.

The road didn’t really get rough until the last two miles, and it was mostly going in and out of washes rather than sharp rocks. Our bags were already packed when we reached the wilderness boundary, and we wasted little time before the four of us headed cross country through the desert. The summit block rose dramatically on the right side of the peak, with our route climbing an arete and gully system just to the right of a deep dark gully on the east-southeast face.

The entire approach from the car to the base of the climbing took only 20 minutes, and we easily identified the start of the first pitch about 30′ right of the deep gully heading up lighter colored rock in a groove. The plan would be for me to lead first and Holly to follow, with Alex leading up Colin on a second rope when Holly was about halfway up the pitch. It was a system we would repeat the entire climb, which left all the routefinding to me.

I started up with a rack of cams and set of nuts, the start of the pitch being mostly third class climbing. Although much of the rock was dubious, there were still many opportunities to place protection if you looked for it, and I climbed up about 50′ before the shallow gully steepened and I moved right onto the arete.

I quickly encountered a two bolt (they may have been pitons?) belay and climbed past, hoping to combine the first two pitches. It was mostly scrambling and moving up easy ledges until reaching a bit of a headwall where the path became more vertical. Above and to the left was an easy ramp system, and I cut up finding the second belay nearly a full rope length from the start.

The meandering nature of the two pitches meant there was some rope drag, but I hadn’t placed much protection and quickly brought up Holly to join me. Alex made it up to the large belay ledge by the time I started up the second pitch, working to the left along a groove with an overhanging flake and crack for protection that I hoped I wouldn’t need to rely on. Some easy chimney moves brought me to a huge ledge and next belay station, and I clipped into the bolt anchor and again brought Holly up the short 50′ pitch.

The third pitch was a bit longer but quite easy, mostly class 3-4 scrambling with a handful of chimney moves that protected (relatively) well. Near the top of the pitch, there was a slightly awkward ramp to the right that brought me to the next large belay ledge. Alex wound up leading left at this spot and had a much harder time with less protection.

The four of us regrouped at the top of the third pitch for the fourth crux pitch, protected by a series of bolts. The route heads almost straight up from this point, and it was hard not to be tempted into what looked like easier climbing in the watercourse to the far left. I passed one bolt that was below a crack/ step up that was frankly useless, and in retrospect I shouldn’t have clipped it, with it really only adding to my drag. I climbed straight up on more vertical rock, clipping a second bolt with the third bolt high above. It was fairly straightforward face climbing to the third bolt, and I clipped it with a long extension and downclimbed a few feet to traverse around the arete to the right. That third clip made the rope drag incredible. I initially placed a cam in a crack but found the drag it added was so difficult that I back cleaned it and ran it out up the easy ground to the fourth anchors. As others had commented before, this smaller belay station is tucked behind a flake and would be easily missed if you continued straight up or went left of the final bolt. It was tough rope drag bringing up Holly, and with the safety of a top rope, she elected to continue directly up the route rather than mess with the traverse. Despite our warnings, Alex did the same, and climbed the thin chossy flakes well above the third bolt to join us at the small belay station.

We were nearly to the top of the gully with the large plateau halfway up the mountain less than 100′ above us. It was unclear which direction to climb to find the anchors, with some old webbing off a boulder to the left suggesting that may be off route. But when I went right, the rock seemed very chossy, and I changed my mind and went to the left to a small cholla basin at the top of the gully. I couldn’t find the anchor (I should have went right) and the rock was super chossy in the basin with no where to build a reasonable or safe anchor. So I body belayed up Holly, making her rather annoyed that we didn’t have the safety of a two bolted anchor for the final pitch. Alex and Colin quickly joined us, and we agreed we should find the two bolt anchor for the rappel now in case we were coming down in the dark, and found it near some cairns up and to the right of the final gully pitch. Although we only had one more pitch of roped climbing, the summit was still high above us, and we headed cross country across goat trails towards the summit block.

We began ascending a slabby gully to a saddle between the summit rocks and a large sub peak in the center of the plateau. The rock in the gully was loose in spots but we found good traction where we could stick to the slabs.

Here I got burned by some incorrect beta from Desert Mountaineer, where he annotated a photo showing that the route and final pitch started at a notch formed by the main summit rocks and a detached block to the south. We climbed this very steep and loose gully to the notch in the picture, only to find an unprotectable overhanging slope and nothing that matched the description of the final pitch, which was supposed to start with a chimney.

We dropped back down the chossy gully, finding some cairns leading out across some exposed ledges halfway across the face. Down low, we spotted a herd of bighorn sheep running across the plateau behind us, accounting for all the game trails we had been finding. The cairns continued out of sight, but I spotted our chimney only partway across, the chokestone at the top matching the description perfectly.

I switched back into climbing shoes and started up the final pitch, making quick work of the chimney and finding a bolt on the ledge above the chokestone to tell me I was on track.

I stepped left onto an arete and climbed up, a bit unsure of where to go from there. I rechecked the beta in my pocket, and read about a difficult to protect step-around a boulder on a ramp to the right to reach the final anchors. Although a bit overhanging, I decided to instead climb a 10′ crack straight up which I could at least protect with cams. I pulled myself over the bulge and clipped into the final anchors. I brought up Holly who elected to climb the 10′ crack as well, and the two of us stared up the very exposed final bit of climbing, supposedly rated only class 4. Not to mention from our vantage point, you couldn’t see how large or narrow the saddle was between our belay station and the summit blocks. Staying on belay, I moved around the corner and was surprised to find the saddle was huge, larger than a basketball court, and Holly unanchored from the belay to join me at the base of the summit rocks.

We agreed that with the exposure (and my recent unfortunate habit of falling off cliffs when un-roped), we would pitch out this final section. The climbing was quite a bit easier than it looked from below, with only one spot where a fall would be truly consequential- a 10′ featured crack about 1/3 of the way up.

I built a trad anchor off some summit rocks and brought up Holly, and the two of us followed the obvious use trail to the top, dropping around a notch to the left and up to the summit. In the afternoon light, the view was incredible with the range highpoint to the southeast, Woolsey Peak and Barry Goldwater Peak to the east, Harquahala Mountain to the north and the Kofa Mountains and Signal Peak to the west. We spent quite a long time at the summit, signing in to the brand new register placed by Tom Seeley of the Arizona Mountaineering Club and wondering what the heck the brand new static line hanging off the summit was for….

From the car to the summit, the climb had taken about 6.5 hours, with about an hour wasted finding the start of the final pitch since we headed up the wrong upper gully. While that time wasn’t too bad, we would get killed in time efficiency during the rappels, virtually all of them but one requiring double ropes, meaning we would need to rap one at a time before we could pull our two ropes and set up the next rappel. Reversing our course down the class 4 using a belay, Holly and I set up the first rappel.

With two ropes, we were able to rap past the exposed catwalk traverse and drop directly into the slabby approach gully.

The sun was dropping quickly as we traversed back over to the top of the fifth pitch anchors, and we started our first of five two rope rappels in a race against the sun.

At each rappel station, I would feed the rope we were pulling directly into the next set of rap rings for efficiency, and we soon got into a rhythm. Still going one at a time was slow with 20 rappels between the 4 of us, and we were less than halfway through the five rappels when we had to pull out our headlamps. I did worry that the low light could make dodging loose rock an issue on all the rope pulls, but it wound up being no big deal with most rappel stations being just out of the rock fall line. The final rappel heads down the large gully directly, and we quickly packed our things back at the base. My GPS helped us located the car as we headed cross country through the desert in the dark, and once back at the car I pulled out a cooler for some cold drinks to celebrate our summit. Laying in the gravel, we turned off our headlamps and enjoyed the faint silhouette of Courthouse Rock, illuminated by a fantastic Milky Way and clear, starry night sky above.