Day 3 found me off SR178 in the southern portion of Death Valley NP between Jubilee and Salsberry Passes. The weather was decidedly iffy today, possible rain forecast as a cold front began sweeping across most of the state. It was 43F in the morning at an elevation of 2,500ft where I'd spent the night alongside the highway, much colder than it had been the day before. The sky was overcast and threatening - I would pack rain gear in case I was to be treated to my first rain in Death Valley. My first order of business was to check out the approach road for Ibex. Zdon describes a road reaching almost three miles south from SR178 to near Ibex. I didn't have much hope of driving the van the whole distance, but it seemed worth seeing if some of it was negotiable.
I found the road somewhat different from that shown on the topo map. The map
shows an east and west entrance to a frontage road that has a junction heading
southeast. The west entrance to the frontage road no longer exists, but the east
one did and I found it driveable in my low clearance vehicle. I got about a mile
along the road before finding it
closed at a second junction. The right fork is
open for another half mile to the southwest, but the one described by Zdon is
no longer open to motor vehicles. I parked here out of the way after turning
around and set out on foot around 7:20a.
The plan for the day was ambitious, including two summits with more 1,000ft of
prominence and two others with more than 600ft. All of them are located in the
southern part of the Black Mountains, also more locally referred to as the Ibex
and Talc Hills. 
Ibex Peak
was the highest and most prominent of the four and it
was to this summit that I started out. I followed the old road for several miles
as it climbs up 
the Bradbury Wash, gaining about 800ft. Behind me
were the prominent peaks of 
Epaulet and 
Salsberry
which were on the following day's agenda, to my left was 
Sheephead
which I'd climbed back in December. Along the
way I found a 56yr-old 
penny
lying in the road, with a dark coating of oxidation
from many years of exposure. I'd often wondered how I'd never found an old coin
lying among the trash heaps of so many abandoned mines and homesteads in the
wild - this made for my first such find.
Just after 8a I'd reached the saddle (the road continues to the American Mine
on the southwest side of Ibex Peak). To 
the southwest could now be
seen Peak 3,392ft, my second objective. I left the
road here to 
head east
towards the higher ground around Ibex. It took another 30 minutes to climb
about 1,000ft over 3/4 mile, following the ridgeline as it arcs eastward before
turning southwest to the summit. There was a set of
nested cans, painted the
familiar red, found at the center of a small pile of rocks. It was cold and
gloomy-looking from the summit, precipitation could be seen to
the northwest
over the Panamints, soon to be heading across Death Valley to the Black
Mountains. The register held a few scraps of paper dating to
1978 and 
1983 before MacLeod and Lilley left a proper
notepad 
in 1985. The peak appears to
be fairly popular with parties filling 21 pages of the notepad over 27 years.
Popular by Death Valley standards, anyway.
I next turned my attention to Peak 3,392ft to the southwest. I had initially imagined using the old road into the Confidence Wash, starting at the junction where I'd left the car. Now at the summit of Ibex, it occurred to me that this would involve a lot of backtracking that might be unnecessary. I could see Peak 3,392ft four miles to the southwest, the intervening terrain not looking too bad at all. In fact it seemed I could drop off the west side of Ibex into the Buckwheat Wash and follow that nearly to the base of the highpoint. And this is what I did. I hadn't realized that the two peaks were at either end of an ill-defined ridgeline separating the Buckwheat and Confidence Washes. The ridgeline itself would have had too much up and down to make it worthwhile to follow, but the Buckwheat Wash follows nicely along the south edge of this nearly to Peak 3,392ft before turning south and dropping into the southern reaches of Death Valley.
Getting off Ibex posed no difficulties and the hike along the sandy
wash bottom
was easy and quite pleasant. I passed by the American Mine without realizing it
was the terminus of the road I had initially followed. There was some
dilapidated structures and the usual collection of
rusted tins. The wash 
narrowed some about a mile past the
mine, but there were no dry waterfalls to
navigate around. It soon opened once again. I found a
tortoise shell in the dry
creekbed, a baseball-sized hole in the top of it. It was the first time I'd seen
any evidence of a tortoise in the desert, a rare find indeed. What might have
killed it I could only speculate. It may have been human or animal looking for
food, or the hole may have occurred when the shell washed down the creek and
slammed into a rock.
As I got closer to Peak 3,392ft, a more careful study of the topo map I
carried showed the wash turns south away from the highpoint a bit sooner than I
might have liked. So I climbed the right embankment
out of 
the wash at a point where the
adjoining ridgeline was low and began following the ridgeline instead. The
ground on the ridgeline was much firmer than the softer sand and gravel of the
wash, with better views too. I followed this modestly undulating route
westward,
as it was now clearer to me that I was on the divide between the two washes.
Every hundred yards or so I would come across a good-sized
rock cairn, composed
of heavy rocks that someone probably spent 15 minutes to collect and stack. As
I was to find out over the course of the day, every ridgeline I hiked had plenty
of these cairns. Whether they were to mark claim boundaries or perhaps just to
remind someone the ridge had already been prospected, I never knew, but it was
obvious that folks had scrambled all over every facet of these hills long before
my arrival. It seemed somewhat odd because this was almost as remote a place as
one could find in Death Valley I'd thought, and I wouldn't have expected so much
prior activity. Possibly it could be accounted for because this portion of the
park was annexed only in 1994 with the California Desert Act, leaving many more
decades for individual rock hounds and miners to forage the hillsides as
compared to the older parts of the park which were first set aside as a National
Monument in 1933.
It was 10:50a before I reached
the highpoint of a north-south crest that forms one of
the highest points in the Talc Hills. With only 600ft of prominence, the summit
did not attract the usual desert peakbaggers who might have felt it worthy of a
register. There was nothing to mark it, cairn, old survey stake, or otherwise.
Though I enjoy finding a register as much as the next peakbagger, I kinda liked the idea of finding a summit untrammeled, and left it the same way when I left.
The summit provides a fine view of the Ibex Hills to 
the east and
Death Valley to the south and west. Looking 
northwest I could make
out the other two summits
of the day, roughly in a line with Desert Hound Peak rising high behind them. I
was now at the southernmost summit of the Black Mountains, or at least those
summits with 500ft of prominence. The sky was growing ever darker, but so far
any precipitation had held off, much to my liking.
Next up was Peak 3,061ft, almost three miles to the northwest.
A ridgeline connects
it to Peak 3,392ft, most of this easy-to-follow route visible as I started
down. To the right of the ridgeline is the Confidence Wash, at one point only
40-50ft below the height of the ridgeline. This contrasts with the left side of
the ridge that drops steeply to a smaller, unnamed wash, more than 2,000ft down
to Death Valley to the west. It is a very marked difference that strikes one as
almost unnatural. It appears that as the ridgeline is worn away through erosion,
this upper part of the Confidence Wash will eventually wear through the ridge
and begin draining more directly to the west down the steeper side of the crest.
Of course there is only occasional torrential rains in the desert, so this
process will naturally take much longer than it might in places with more
substantial precipitation. Speaking of which, it began to slowly drizzle on me
as I made my way along the ridgeline, the wind picking up significantly as the
front began to sweep over the range. As the rain became more pronounced with
time, I had to eventually don my rain parka to keep my shirt from getting too
wet and my upper body from growing chilled. Luckily there was no threat from
lightning or flooding. Over the next several hours the rain would remain light,
but fairly constant with high winds. There was enough falling on the ground to
puddle in the rocks, but never enough to start flowing in any of the creek
channels.
The most interesting item I came across on the way to Peak 3,061ft was a small
rattlesnake
I found coiled up on the ridgeline, exposed to the elements. At
first I thought it was dead as it was almostly completely flattened, its body
looking like a flattened inner tube rather than the rounded shape one is used
to. I touched it lightly with my gloved hand, but it moved not. I then lifted
one side up and flipped it over gently to see if it was dead or alive. The
snake came slowly to life, inflating its body to the normal shape and eventually
lifting its head and testing the air with a few flicks of its tongue. It struck
me that it had been in some sort of hibernating state that it had slowly
awakened from. Sensing the snake needed to conserve its energy reserves in the
cold temperatures, I didn't want to taunt it further and let it be. I was
surprised that it hadn't crawled into a rock crevice to get out of the wind - it
was the first time I recalled seeing one lying in the open like that.
It was 12:30p by the time I reached
the summit of Peak 3,061ft. There was an old
survey stake and a small rock cairn found here, but no register. Like the
previous one, this summit had 600ft+ of prominence, not enough to garner the
attention of the usual peakbaggers. Because of the wet conditions outside, I
kept my camera buried in my pack to keep it as dry as possible, not bothering
to take the usual set of view shots from the summit. Two and a half miles
further to the northwest was the last peak in the area, Peak 3,110ft. Though a
shorter distance than the previous summits, this would be the hardest one since
there is a significant drop of nearly 2,000ft to the Confidence Wash that drains
to the west between the two summits. It looked like a lot of work and
with the poor weather enveloping me I was of half a mind to call it a day and
head back to the van. I also knew that the peak was more easily approached from
SR178 to the north of Peak 3,110ft, the route being less than two miles and less
elevation gain, too. But as it was just past noon and I had almost seven hours
of daylight remaining, I decided to press on. I was quite happy in the end that
I did.
It took nearly two and a half hours to cover the two and half miles - not a very blistering pace by any measure. But the descent off Peak 3,061ft was interesting, following mainly in one of the ravines dropping into the Confidence Wash. It had some fun scrambling down short, dry waterfalls (not exactly dry now with all the terrain wet). I also noticed that the drab lichens that clung to rocks in the shadier parts of the ravine had come to life with the rain, soaking in the life-giving liquid like a sponge and turning a more brilliant green in a short period of time. Other plants in the ravine took on a fresh look with wet leaves glistening, their younger green leaves looking that much healthier for it.
By the time I had reached the bottom and begun the 
hike across
the Confidence
Wash, the rain had let up for the day and the rocks began to dry out though the
sandy portions remained damp. The wash, leading 
down to Death Valley
through a gap in the range, was half a mile wide and filled with loose rock and
gravel. 
Peak 3,110ft rose steeply across the other
side and I looked for what seemed the most direct route to the summit. It
probably didn't matter much which way I went, as most routes either up ridges
or ravines looked similarly feasible. I chose a steep ridge just to the left of
the summit, taking about an hour to climb it. Like other places I'd visited
during the day, the ridge was lined with 
cairns
every 50 to 100 yards. One had a small tobacco tin tucked inside, but the
contents were little more than dust when I opened it.
When I reached 
the summit
just after 3p I found a register in a small glass jar
inside the summit cairn. Labeling the peak LongRidge Peak, a loose page had been
placed 
in 1978 by Andy Smatko and Frank Yates. The register was left
a year later by a 
MacLeod/Lilley party with only six pages used since
that time. 
Sumner, 
Vitz, and 
Sue & Vic Henney
were the recognizable names. There is a great
view of most of the Confidence Wash drainage from the summit, with multiple
branches starting high in the 
southern part of the Black Mountains,
sweeping down 
between Peaks 3,061ft and Peak 3,110ft, and then draining
into Death Valley to the south. To 
the northwest is Jubilee
Mtn with the Rhodes Wash draining between it and the summit I stood on. To
the north rose the higher summits of the
range with the highpoint, Funeral Mtn, hidden by clouds.
I considered several options for the return. The easiest would probably have
been to head north to the highway and then thumb a ride back to near where I'd
parked. That seemed like cheating though, and I didn't want to disturb the
wonderful feeling of solitude I'd had throughout the day. I settled on what
turned out to be a fairly direct return, dropping back to the Confidence Wash,
following it up to a mine that was indicated on the map and then picking up a
road back to the start from there. The mine was visible from the summit, though
from a distance it was impossible to tell if it was a large shaft opening or
some other structure. Upon 
getting closer
it turned out to be a large wooden
rampart at one of the mine entrances. It took more than two hours to cover the
distance from the summit to the mine. I spent some time while I was there to
explore several of the horizontal 
mine shafts.
None of them went in more than
about 20 yards and it didn't appear that much of any value was ever removed,
despite the apparent expense in organizing and supplying the effort.
It was after 6p when I reached 
the saddle
between the Confidence and Bradbury
drainages where I found the end of the driveable portion of the road I had
parked along. From 
there
it was only half a mile to the car. Around the time
that I arrived the sun reappeared low on the horizon, having ducked under
the clouds and lit up the landscape for the last twenty minutes before sunset.
It made for an unusual view of the landscape with the bright hillsides
contrasting with the dark clouds that remained overhead. I took pictures of
Ibex, 
Salsberry, 
Sheephead, and
Epaulet Peak before turning the camera to the 
last rays
on the underside of the cloud layer after the sun had gone down.
In a most unusual move, I ended up driving nowhere following my hike. I showered, ate dinner and slept the night where I had parked in the morning. This had the advantage of giving me lots of sleep which was most welcome following the long day. The next day's plan was to hike to Epaulet and Salsberry Peaks on the north side of the highway, so I would only have a few miles to drive in the morning. More than a mile from the highway, I would hear none of the light traffic to travel the road in the night and slept quite soundly.
Continued...