A couple of weeks ago, my hiking partner and I finally embarked on our first South Mountain hike. I think I worked myself up a little too much over this mountain range. I kept hearing how hard South Mountain is, but when compared to the most challenging mountain for us (Piestewa Peak), South Mountain isn’t all that bad! Challenging, yes. Rocky and narrow too. And we’ll be hiking this summit in the dark on Phoenix Summit Challenge day. Which should be interesting.
But this is an interesting mountain. At the top, there is a brick structure that appears to be left behind. And the hike follows a canyon for most of the way.
Luckily, it was shady for the better part of our hike, because the heat is still raging here in Phoenix. We have the second South Mountain hike to finish next weekend, and then we will have completed all of the hikes on the Challenge roster individually. Next up in the training plan is to start combining our hikes, but again, the heat is still raging here! We are hoping to start doing more than one mountain at each training session next month, because November 23 is coming up QUICK. In the meantime, we’ll be working on shaving time off our individual hikes since we’ll only have 12 hours to complete all seven of them, including drive time between mountain ranges!
In case you are interested, here is the 2013 Phoenix Summit Challenge route schedule (26 miles total). Click them to see our previous training days!
South Mountain-Dobbin’s Lookout
South Mountain
Piestewa Peak
Phoenix Mountain Preserve/Dixie Peak
Lookout Mountain
North Mountain
Shaw Butte
Keep following along, and we’ll get there soon! Here’s the Phoenix Summit Challenge page for more info.
