Mind Over Mt. Lemmon

Mount Lemmon is in the Santa Catalina Mountains located in the Coronado National Forest north of Tucson.

That's me overlooking Catalina Highway near "Windy Point." Pictures can be deceiving.... I was trying to overcome my "fear of ledges." I believe it is an issue of "mind over matter."

This is my daughter with our favorite climbing guide Jeff Fassett on "Hitchcock Pinnacle." Jeff is a certified Mountain Guide. Arizona Climbing Guides distinguishes itself from other guide services by its full commitment to formal training and certification through the American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA).

Hitchcock Pinnacle is named after Frank Harris Hitchcock who was a the local newspaper editor who inspired the construction of Hitchcock Highway.

This area is called "Windy Point" and it was built by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, using a large number of prisoners over a period of 18 years, and is a popular place for outdoor weddings. (Squeezing the Lemmon).

 

Mt. Lemmon was named after botanist Sarah Lemmon.

The lichen on the rock here is very unusual.

Southern Arizona was once stretched during a tectonic event called the Basin and Range Extension. During this event large blocks (mostly sedimentary and volcanic) were down dropped while older underlying rocks were exhumed along large faults, or breaks, in the earth's crust. Underlying granite and gneiss were uplifted to nearly 10,000' above sea level and form the present day Santa Catalina Mountains.

Here comes Jeff now...

Climbing along the Mount Lemmon Highway is mostly gneiss, granite rock.

The quality, texture, and composition varies, however, because the mountain range is composed of ten or more individual plutons (bodies of igneous rock cooled beneath the earth's surface) that were exposed to varying degrees of metamorphism. The individual plutons combined to form a large composite batholith.

This looks fun, .... Did I do that?

This is hairpin in the Lower Highway (p. 16 Squeezing the Lemmon II).

The Saguraro National Park(east). The west park is on the other side of Tucson about 30 miles away. 91,327 acres of landscape and life of the Sonora Desert are preserved here. We had just enough time to do the six-mile Bajada Loop Drive on this trip.