After my 'rest' day on San Joaquin Mountain, I drove up to Tioga Lake campground to meet up with Sooz and Pavla for the weekend. They had secured some campsites…
In 2004 I climbed one of my first Sierra summits, Chocolate Peak. It sits among the lakes of Bishop Creek, a small bump compared to the surrounding ranges. From Chocolate's…
Having kicked off my two week trip by being chased off of a peak by storms the previous day, I was looking forward to the long term forecast of clear and warm…
Two weekends ago we took Thor on his second camping trip. We headed out, as usual, to the Eastern Sierra to camp, fish, hike, and bag peaks. Our first night…
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.
Our original mid-Thanksgiving week plans called for Bridge Mountain, a peak that has been on my bucket list for quite some time. Unfortunately, the weekend storms had left a dusting of snow on the rainbow escarpment that was just deep enough to concern us. First, the nasty 4×4 road to get to the trailhead was already a challenge, and snowy and/or wet conditions would make it worse. Second, there is some exposed class 3 scrambling on the way to the peak, and although that can be really fun on the good sandstone, when it is wet it can get slippery and much more dangerous. So, plans scrapped. Boo.
Luckily, Robin had been in contact with Harlan Stockman, and he offered an alternate: he’d guide us to another impressive peak in the area, the informally named “Sentinel” in Lake Mead National Recreation Area. I had never met Harlan but was more than familiar with his prolific collection of trip reports over at his website and had used his beta on more than one occasion. I was excited to get to climb with a local peak-bagging star and get some good beta first-hand.
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.
