It sounded like a good idea at the time: Entering the Phoenix Summit Challenge.
In a smaller scale version of the epic “Seven Summits” – the highest peaks on each of the seven continents – we would scale seven smaller summits in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve… in one day.
“We could do the two-day event, you know – three summits one day, four the next,” I said to Team Limoncello member Kristi Olson, who was tasked with entering said team in said event.
“Seven summits. One day. We can do this. Don’t be a wimp,” she insisted. “One day.”
Yet that one day would be days after I succumbed to the antibiotic-resistant mega-bug known as consumption or maybe it was typhoid… or dysentery… or cholera… I consulted The Big Book of Things That Can Kill You: Self-Diagnosis for the Hypochondriac and determined that it must have been SARS… or maybe even MRSA.
And so, the month of October disappeared in a fog of Tylenol Cold and Sinus, NyQuil, DayQuil, Airbourne, pseudoephedrine, sneezing, hacking and coughing – and I awoke at 4 AM on Sunday, November 11 with throbbing feet, wishing I could roll right over and go back to sleep. Instead, I drove to Kellee’s house, and together we drove to meet Kristi at Papago Park to begin our one-day adventure.
If your name is Jeffro, now is when you can click on the link below to read the “jump” so you can finish the story (rather than wait for the never-arriving cliffhanger). If you’re a normal reader, you know that if you want to continue reading, you can just click on the link below…

The Phoenix Summit Challenge requires that you complete each of the Seven Summits in an order determined by the parks department after a hard night of hitting the crack pipe: The saddle at Papago Buttes, Camelback Mountain via Echo Canyon, Piestewa Peak (from a parking lot a half-mile away from the trailhead), the 7-mile South Mountain slog (with a 3-mile stint on the pavement near the radio towers), Lookout Mountain (only 24 miles by car north from South Mountain), Shaw Butte (a 5-mile Bataan Death March) and North Mountain (which has a sign at the summit saying you can go no further because the Federal Communications Commission will not allow you to be that close to the radio towers due to harmful rays).
Let me repeat: HARMFUL RAYS. And I ask you: How is that chain-link fence protecting us from harmful rays on THIS side… but not on THAT side?
So we started our day before sunrise, huddled in Kristi’s SUV against the cold of a 54-degree morning. Kellee recalled that the last time she’d seen the sunrise was a mere two years ago when we three were descending into the Grand Canyon. And if you’ve read any of our previous adventures, you know that’s an inauspicious way to start the day.
Important Safety Tip: If you’re one of the 800 people undertaking the Phoenix Summit Challenge, do the other 799 of us a favor and WEAR DEODORANT, because in the cool morning breeze when you’re doing your best to elbow your way through us to beat us up the summit IN THE DARK, we may not be able to see your stinky ass, but we can sure smell you. Oh, and when you fall because of your own smug impatience, we will laugh at you. Yeah, that was Kellee saying, “That’s what you get for trying to jump in line.” And that was me saying, “Just because you are an asshole doesn’t mean you have to smell like one.” And Kristi was the one that kicked gravel in your face as she passed.
So after getting our passports stamped for completing the Papago Buttes pseudo-summit, we drove to the parking lot at Shemer Arts Center for the shuttle to Camelback Mountain. To ensure you make it to and from each mountain and don’t fall off, you check in and out at each trailhead and get your passport stamped at each summit… unless your name is Kristi Olson.
Since our downtown skyline isn’t the most architecturally intriguing, Camelback Mountain may be the most iconic image of Phoenix… but that doesn’t mean it’s fun to hike. Sure there are crazy people who like to RUN up and down the Camel every day because they are searching for something to fill the painful void in their meaningless lives and they have yet to discover TiVO. But truly, ascending – and descending – Camelback isn’t so much hiking as it is whaling on your knees with a cat-o-nine-tails if you’re Kellee (see Team Limoncello Mud Run) … or conquering your most vertiginous terrors if you’re Kristi (see Team Limoncello Grand Canyon) … or creating new conjunctions of curse words if you’re me (see Opposable Thumbs… and Grand Canyon… and pretty much every entry on this blog).
So, it took us an hour-and-change to get up and down the Camel, and we were shuttling to the car, when Kristi asked, “How did you get a stamp on your passport from Camelback, but I didn’t?”
“There was a guy at the summit stamping everyone’s passports,” Kellee said. “You were just busy breathing and trying not to look down.”
“Feel free to go hike back up there and get it stamped if it’s that important to you,” I said. “We’ll see you at (politically incorrect name) Peak.”
And it was at Politically Incorrectly Named Peak that the wheels came off our little adventure. With Kellee’s knee bleeding (see Camelback) and our lungs burning from the gorgeous brown sky surrounding us, we clambered our way up the second most iconic image of the Phoenix skyline. Again, there are people who RUN up and down Piestewa Peak every day, probably because they need to inflict searing pain on their joints so they can at least feel SOMETHING in the empty caverns of their bleak day-to-day lives. Again, I am not one of those people: If I need to feel pain, there’s always a hangover – or watching reality TV on my TiVO. But we made it up Piestewa Peak. Here’s proof:

It was the going down that was the bad part because Kellee’s knee locked up (see Mud Run) and I was not willing to piggyback her (see Jeffro at Mud Run), so I gave her one of my ski poles to serve as a crutch while she hobbled stiff-legged to the trailhead… and she still kicked my ass down the mountain, but at least she was done.
“Good luck, guys,” she said, as we dropped her at her house en route to South Mountain. “I’m going back to bed.”
Bitch.
“That said, I really don’t want to do South Mountain,” I offered, popping my third trifecta of Advil for the morning. The day prior, I had been on my feet all day at our Local First Fall Festival. In a feeble attempt to stay off my feet, I volunteered to sit and paint children’s faces… It sounded like a good idea at the time… and you know I wanted to stay off my feet if I WILLINGLY CHOSE to interact at close range with children for SIX HOURS – but my fellow board members needed me to emcee, so I ended up standing all day, and my feet ended up telling me that was a dumb thing to do when I awoke to their throbbing screams of agony at 2:45 the morning of my Seven Summits hike.
“Why don’t we get some lunch?” Kristi said.
“I think that’s a splendid idea,” I said, “because South Mountain or not, I’m not finishing this thing by chewing cardboard Power Bars and doing shots of Gu that look, feel and taste like something I hacked up last month.”
So Kristi and I had some bagels and used said establishment’s flush toilets, and our mid-day rejoinder would have been even more splendidly civilized had we washed everything down with Bloody Marys and White Russians, but we still had four more Summits to do, dammit.
Make that three – my persuasive powers prevailed upon Kristi to ditch South Mountain since we were already half-way to Lookout Mountain as the Politically Incorrectly Named Freeway flies. Besides, we’d hiked the whole South Mountain trek two weeks prior, and thus had technically completed all Seven Summits – just not in one day. So I called my sweet husband Pat to let him know we’d had a change of plans.
“Well how many steps have you taken so far?” he asked. I checked my Jenny Craig-issued pedometer: 23,250.
“Dude, you can’t quit before 30,000,” he said. “At least do 30,000 steps.”
Kristi agreed it was a worthy challenge – and we figured we’d knock out 7,000 steps at Lookout Mountain and be done with it. That was, until we started walking up Lookout Mountain and realized that our lunch had taken exactly the same amount of time as the “really fast people” had taken to scale South Mountain and drive like maniacs to Lookout Mountain where they proceeded to hog the parking lot. So we got to climb Lookout Mountain (only about a mile-and-a-half round trip – not including the walk to the car) with all the really fit people who didn’t bother to put on deodorant and felt it necessary to say, “SMILE! AREN’T YOU HAVING FUN?!?” as they passed us on their way DOWN the mountain.
“Do I look like I’m having fun?” Kristi asked. “Do I have a sign on my head that says ANNOY ME!?! Why do all these people feel it necessary to talk to me? Do I look like I want to have a conversation?”
Sadly, the only conversation I had at the bottom of Lookout Mountain started with the F-word when I realized that we’d only covered only 4,000 steps – even though we’d had to walk three blocks to get to our cars. We consulted the trail maps: Shaw Butte and North Mountain were our only remaining options.
“I can’t afford to be choppered off Shaw Butte,” I said.
“The only way I’m doing Shaw Butte is if I can strap a harness to my dog Zoe and have her haul our asses up that hill,” Kristi said. “Otherwise, it’s North Mountain.”
“And if we come up short,” I said, “we can just walk in circles around our cars until we hit 30,000 steps.”
We did not come up short on North Mountain – we just got to the fence that said we could go no further due to HARMFUL RAYS – so we got our passports stamped and stomped back down the mountain. If you’ve ever climbed North Mountain, you know it’s not so much a hike as it is walking up a paved road to a cluster of radio towers, while people in flip-flops saunter by with their foo-foo dogs and incredibly fit super-bodies rage against the existential nothingness of their lives (and give neither a whit nor whiff to the fact that deodorant was invented for days like these).
We got to the bottom of the hill and took a photo – not noticing at the time that the sign in the background accurately described how we looked – see below. Nonetheless, we rejoiced in being done with our day. Not exactly one giant leap for a man like Hillary scaling Everest – but instead, 33,303 small steps for two complaining women up five of seven summits.