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By Bob Payne
When you reach the summit of a mountain, you may be the only one who thinks it's an occasion worthy of getting out a cell phone to let the rest of the world know. That's not the only valuable thing I learned the morning I ascended Camelback, a mountain outside of Phoenix that is supposedly one of the most climbed in America.
Although it has been attracting humans for perhaps 1,000 years, Camelback is not exactly Mt. Everest (and not even the Mt. Everest of Arizona; other nearby peaks are higher). From base to peak it's only 1,300 feet, and along the steepest sections of the Echo Canyon Trail, the most popular route for the 300,000 people who are said to attempt the summit each year, there are handrails.
Death and frequent rescues are not unknown on Camelback. But they are mostly associated with rock climbers who continue to prove that there are even difficult ways to get to the top of easy mountains. For most visitors, the climb is simply a scramble up a rocky trail; the real challenge of Camelback is the heat. On the day I made my climb, temperatures reached 108 degrees.
I don't think I was physically unprepared for the climb. I lead a fairly active life, which has included treks at more than 14,000 feet. Nor were my three companions particularly out of shape--although it is true that I recruited them an evening earlier at the bar at the rehearsal dinner for my brother-in-law's wedding.
We followed local advice by loading up with water and by arriving at the small parking lot at the base of the trail well before 6 a.m. That guaranteed that we would be able to get to the top and back before the sun really started beating down. Still, although the climb took only about an hour, it was no stroll through downtown Phoenix.
"What a view," I said, about five minutes up the trail. It's pretty much the same view you get out the window of your plane landing or taking off at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. But my appreciation of it was intensified because it gave me an excuse to take a breather. Not that any of my companions complained. With each step, we all hoped for a view, preferably one with shade, and took a few more sips of our increasingly precious water. By the time we reached the top we'd stopped so many times to admire the city and the desert laid out below that you'd have thought we were all aspiring landscape artists.
Many of the hundreds of other people making the climb that morning seemed to find it as much an effort--and appreciated the opportunity to stop and admire the view--as we did. "Oh, look, I can see a 7-Eleven," one of them said with what sounded like great rapture. Then there were the really annoying souls--and there were more than a few--who didn't have time for sightseeing. They were too busy running up the mountain.
At the top, while my companions and I split what we thought was a well-earned bag of trail mix, I talked to one of the runners, who told us his time to the top was 23 minutes. "My God," I said to him, "don't you worry about heat stroke?" No, he said, mostly he worried about leaving his car in a no-parking zone. He ran up the mountain every other morning, and the parking lot was often full before sunrise, so parking tickets were becoming a major expense.
As I headed back down the mountain with the temperate well over 100 and people still running up, it occurred to me that for all of man's shortcomings (war, spa vacations, the creation of SUVs), we can adapt to our environment as well as any other creature on this planet. Now if only we could figure out what to do about parking tickets.
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Illustration by Jason Schneider
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