About two years ago I was browsing through a desert trip report website and came across a beautiful rock art site in Mojave National Preserve. Called Counsel Rocks, I decided…
During last summer's two week peak bagging extravaganza, I took a few 'rest' days with easier peaks. On one of those days I decided to head up into the White…
The third day of our Thanksgiving trip was spent in the southern end of Mojave National Preserve, exploring some fun rock formations and old mining sights. The Sheep Corral is…
I'm going to use the theme of "Throwback Thursday" to start revisiting some trips I never got around to writing about. First up is an exploration of the Surprise Tank Petroglyphs…
We kicked off Thanksgiving week with a tour of an area northwest of Barstow known as the Black Mountain Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC). This is a fascinating BLM…
For our final day in Death Valley during Thanksgiving week, we wanted something a little simpler than the previous day’s climb of Bat Mountain. The Death Valley Buttes fit our criteria perfectly. The Buttes are a semi-isolated set of bumps where the Grapevine and Funeral Mountains meet. Their position in the Valley provides some great views south towards Badwater and west towards the Mesquite Dunes.
Near the town of Death Valley Junction a distinct peak rises from the desert floor. This peak is part of the “Bat Mountain” range, and has always been on my radar due to its interesting profile. Topo maps label Bat Mountain as a smaller bump on the north end of the short range, but the true high point of the range is on the southern end. Furthermore, two peaks are often confused as the high points, and are usually referred to as Bat Mountain (N) and Bat Mountain (S).
The peak with the interesting profile, Bat Mountain (N), is the true high point by a few feet. This is a very infrequently climbed peak and it was difficult to find beta. Fortunately we got just enough that we felt confident enough to spend the day after Thanksgiving hiking to the summit.
Continuing our trend of summiting infrequently climbed peaks, we took off Monday morning to hike Shadow Mountain. The route began from our camp area at the Shadow Mountain Mine and followed old mining roads and eventually the southwest ridge to the summit. It is a rather small and insignificant peak compared to its neighbors Kingston and Clark, and that combined with the bad roads make it a rarely visited summit.
To start out, we followed an old road past the mill building ruins and machinery pads and into the hills that flank Shadow Mountain. We could have driven most of this road, but a large washout about 1/4 mile past the mine site blocked progress by vehicle. No problem – we don’t mind walking!
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The bright sunny Sunday morning that we were hoping for didn’t materialize exactly as planned, but the clouds had cleared enough for us to get a peek at our objective for the day, Kingston Peak, and we didn’t like what we saw. Behind the ridges the higher rocky peaks were coated in a fair amount of snow. The last part of the route up Kingston is scrambling around rock, and none of us were eager to do that in icy or potentially deep snow conditions. Luckily we had come prepared with a nearby alternate: the high point of the Mesquite Mountain range.
