A woman was pulled to safety by rope Monday night after her car crashed off the side of South Mountain and landed off the roadway near Telegraph Pass. She managed to climb out of the vehicle on her own before rescuers reached her, and she was taken to a nearby hospital in stable condition.
Phoenix Fire Department technical rescue crews responded around 8 p.m. Monday to reports of a car that had crashed and landed off the road at Telegraph Pass, according to KTAR News 92.3 FM. Fire officials located the vehicle 150 feet down the mountainside, the outlet reported, and crews used ropes to haul the woman back up to the roadway. What led the car to leave the road remains unclear, per the same account.
A Notoriously Treacherous Stretch of Road
Summit Road and other mountain roadways inside South Mountain Park feature narrow travel lanes, sharp blind curves, and steep drop-offs along the ridge, according to the City of Phoenix. The city's own guidance warns motorists to exercise extreme caution and obey posted speed limits because of the dangerous drops and the fact that the road is shared with cyclists. The park's winding mountain roads also feature steep drop-offs.
Monday's crash was not the first serious wreck on that stretch. In March 2024, a 31-year-old woman was killed and two children were injured when her SUV lost control at high speed and rolled over off Telegraph Pass Road, according to 12News. Phoenix police at the time noted that speed and suspected alcohol were factors in that fatal crash. Years earlier, in September 2019, Phoenix emergency crews rescued a young woman in stable but serious condition after her car tumbled 20 feet off the road at South Mountain, according to a report from KGUN9.
Rescue Teams Stay Busy Across Phoenix's Peaks
Pulling a vehicle back up a 150-foot embankment requires the specialized rope skills of the Phoenix Fire Department's Technical Rescue Team, whose members complete a 200-hour, five-week training program, according to Fire Apparatus Magazine. Those crews are typically veteran firefighters with roughly a decade of service, and extractions like this one require specialized rescue work.
South Mountain Park and Preserve sprawls across more than 16,000 acres and three mountain ranges, reaching elevations up to 2,330 feet at Dobbins Lookout, making it one of the largest municipally managed urban parks in the country, per the City of Phoenix. That scale helps explain why the park accounts for roughly 23 percent of all mountain rescue calls in Phoenix, with 132 rescue dispatches recorded from 2021 through early 2026, according to Hoodline's earlier reporting on a technical rescue on the park's Javelina Trail. Phoenix Fire technical crews responded to 74 mountain rescues across Camelback Mountain, Piestewa Peak, and South Mountain between January 1 and May 20, 2026 alone, Hoodline reported in coverage of a separate rope rescue at Papago Park.
Access Rules and Safety Measures Already in Place
South Mountain Park's main gated vehicle entrances open at 5 a.m. and close at 7 p.m. daily, though the park's trails stay accessible to the public until 11 p.m., according to the City of Phoenix. The city lists entrance and trail hours separately. The city has also restricted vehicle access on the park's main roadway during monthly Silent Sundays, closing Summit Road to cars on the fourth Sunday of each month from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. to dedicate the route to cyclists and pedestrians.
Phoenix Fire's mountain-rescue work is part of its broader emergency response. Whether city officials have weighed additional guardrails or safety barriers along Telegraph Pass Road following the previous serious crashes there has not been addressed in available reporting.
