Karl had arrived sometime during the night, joining me at the Amboy Crater parking lot off old US Route 66 in the Mojave Desert. He'd come out to join me for 4-5 days on my birthday desert trip. Others would be joining come the weekend, but for today it would be just Karl and myself.
Amboy Crater
Bob Sumner had been the one to suggest this one. Though it has little prominence, it is a named summit, has a trail leading to the top and is rather easy to boot. Unfortunately Bob had to cancel on the trip due to a family emergency and wouldn't be joining us, but we kept this one on the schedule since it was near the meeting spot and practically a freebie. The 250-foot high crater is estimated to be a relatively young 80,000 years old. In its prime, large volumes of basaltic lava split out from its crater and covered an area of more than
24 sq. miles.
The BLM day use area appears to be relatively
new, consisting of two paved parking areas, 
shaded and unshaded picnic
sites and clean 
pit toilets of modern construction. The trail leads to
the summit in about 1.5mi, crossing some rough volcanic terrain on its way.
There appears to be several threads of what was once a use trail with BLM
trail markers used to periodically show the preferred route of travel.
The trail eventually climbs up the west side of the cinder cone where the
crater was breached on that side. The use trail continues down into the
crater's bottom with various branches connecting it to another
use trail that circumnavigates the crater rim. The
highpoint is on the south side of the feature without much to distinguish it
from its surroundings. Though we had started before 7a on a Thursday morning,
there were several other parties that reached it around the same time, a
testament to its popularity. Our whole outing came in at almost exactly an hour.
Mercury Mountain
33mi east of Amboy Crater lies Mercury Mtn, a not-so-impressive standalone summit at the north end of the Old Woman Mtns. It is included in Zdon's Desert Summits which is what had brought it to my attention, though I can't say I'd recommend it for any other reason. We drove our cars to
Essex
along Route 66 where we left my van to carpool in Karl's Element. The
sometimes sandy route was not difficult to manage in his medium-clearance,
all-wheel drive vehicle. We drove about 10mi to the Golden Fleece mine east
of the peak and hiked from there. It's fairly easy from this side (and probably
every other side as well), covering less than three miles roundtrip with the
first half mile 
along the roadway we had thought it was getting a bit
too rough, but found afterwards that we could drive it all the way to the
Wilderness boundary). We passed by an old, vertical 
mineshaft,
partially
boarded up, shortly after leaving the road. We headed up one of several
possible ridgelines on the 
east side, finding some easy (and avoidable)
class 3 to entertain us on what was otherwise a
ho-hum ascent. Reaching 
the top in
about 45min, we found a pair of nested red tin cans holding a MacLeod/Lilley
register dating 
to 1984. The 
second entry
was more than 20yrs later with most
of the register's six pages filled by the usual suspects. We descended an
alternate ridgeline south of the one used for ascent, dropping
into a wash before finally rejoining our original route back to where
we'd 
parked the car, taking about an hour and 45min all told.
Carbonate Peak
This summit is the second highest and third most prominent peak in the Old Woman Mtns. It is upstaged by Old Woman Mtn, a DPS summit with more than 2,000ft of prominence that lies across Carbonate Gulch from Carbonate Peak. A rough Jeep road reaches into Carbonate Gulch and the Wilderness from the west but I wasn't about to suggest we abuse Karl's Element with that effort. Instead, we approached from the north starting at the gated
Wilderness boundary
along the same road we
had driven to Mercury Mtn. This was a far more significant effort than either
of the first two peaks, more than 5mi one-way with 2,000ft of gain. It turned
out to be easier than the stats would indicate because the first two miles
followed an old mining road and the second two were along a wide,
sandy wash that made for an 
easy walk. The last mile was
where we earned our keep, an interesting combination of 
rocky gully
and steeper climbing on more open slopes. The gully was
somewhat brushy, particularly with catclaw that managed to draw blood
as it raked across 
Karl's face at one point (it's not an adventure
until someone bleeds). A few 
dry waterfalls provided some easy class 3
scrambling. It was nearly 2p before we
reached the summit with a fine view of this rugged range looking both north
and south. It was interesting to find that we were less than 100ft lower than
Old Woman Mtn to 
the northwest and that several candidates to
the south were of nearly the same height as ourselves - surely there
was more to explore in this range.
The register we found was more interesting than that on Mercury Mtn. This one
dated 
to 1970,
left by RS Fink, a noteworthy HPS climber in decades past. More
than seven pages were filled with various names until Gordon and Barbara left
their entry 
in 1984,
the day before their visit to Mercury Mtn. More pages of
entries followed, 19 in all and far more than one might expect from a remote
desert peak. It seems that the road in Carbonate Gulch was the starting point
for many of the visitors - hunters, geologists and peakbaggers alike. Most
surprising was the 
previous party
had arrived sometime this very day, unseen
by us, where it had been more than two years since the party before them. Our
descent route was a modest variation, dropping off the 
east side
of the summit
and into the adjacent wash that led back out to the main wash we had come in
on. The topo map shows a Sweetwater Spring along this route near the base of
the mountain but we found no flowing (or sitting) water anywhere. After another
long but enjoyable walk in the 
sandy wash, we 
returned to our
car at the Wilderness boundary around 4:15p, not long before sunset.
It would be nearly dark before we'd driven the 10mi back to Essex and my van. After showering roadside (there are very few cars driving by this lonely stretch of Route 66), we drove north to Interstate 40 and then east to Needles where we met up with Evan for dinner. It had been nearly two year since I'd last seen Evan, even longer for Karl, so we had a lot of catching up to do. We spent the night parked northwest of Needles, at the end of a short stretch of gravel/dirt road west of the intersection of W Park Rd & River Rd, a very quiet spot as it turned out...
Continued...