Thu, Dec 9, 2021
|
With: | Eric Smith |
Tom Grundy | |
Iris Ma |
We spent the first half hour and change walking up the remaining bits of road
in the wash to a private inholding at
a spring. Cattle once
grazed here, but it appears to have been many years since the land has been
used for this or any purpose, other than as defacto Wilderness. We scrambled
onto
the left bank where the spring and
an old dam are
encountered. A few
cottonwoods still grow in the grave-filled dam. We
had Adam Walker's GPX track with us, but rather than continue up the canyon
past the spring as he'd done, we turned northwest to begin
climbing slopes into the drainage southeast of our peak, a shortcut on
Adam's track. This worked nicely, passing through a small saddle before
dropping a short distance into the SE drainage. This soon leads to the
first and
largest dryfall found in the drainage, a sporty class 3 climb
that we made
in turns.
Above this,
the going gets
easier but there's still plenty of
fun scrambling, sometimes dodging
cholla, catclaw and
other thorny plants that inhabit the range. At
the end of the second hour, we had
reached a saddle between our summit
and a striking pinnacle to the northeast. There was some discussion on how to
proceed from this point. Adam's track takes a detour around the north side of
the NE Ridge to eventually climb the peak from the west. We were only 1/3mi
from the summit at the saddle, and I wondered why we couldn't just
follow the ridge more directly. I went into salesman mode, selling the
route as a fine scramble, though I knew nothing the others didn't. Had I done
more research, I would have found that Stav had climbed the ridge directly with
what he called a single class 3 move. We found more than a single move, but it
was
good scrambling and undoubtedly quicker than Adam's class 2
bypass. We used a convenient ramp on
the SE side of the ridge for the
second half, getting us to
the summit only 15min from the
saddle.
We found a register dating to 1998, and
views diminished by
threatening weather, looking like it might rain almost any time. We could see
rain in the distance and watched it grow closer over the next few hours. We
reversed our route off Battleship's summit,
returning to the
first saddle adjacent to the pinnacle. Beyond the pinnacle was
Peak 4,100ft, an unnamed summit of minor consequence that we decided
to visit since it had sufficient prominence. Though the pinnacle had little
prominence, Tom had been eyeing it and would pay a visit while the rest of us
traversed around it on the north side. Tom found what appeared to be the only
reasonable route on
the NE side with some stiff scrambling that he
would later rate as class 4 to low fifth. Possibly within my abilities, but
not ones I felt like exercising today. We found the ascent of Peak 4,100ft via
the route we used to have more class 3 as we worked around
the west side before finding a route up to
the summit. Now
almost 11a, we found no register here and after a short pause, looked to get
down before the weather arrived. From the top of Peak 4,100ft, I spied a
possible alternate for the descent, utilizing
a gully descending from
the saddle between Peak 4,100ft and the pinnacle. It wasn't obvious that it
would work as there was a good chance we might run into a serious dryfall, but
it seemed worth investigating. The others offered no resistance, equally vested
in looking for a shortcut. The
alternate route worked nicely at
class 2-3,
rejoining the ascent gully just above the 30-foot
dryfall we had ascended earlier. We
reversed the class 3 on this,
worked our way through
a cholla garden to return to
Cottonwood Canyon, then
back to the Jeep by 12:40p -
success! - with only a few droplets of rain. We drove back out
to the highway where we collected the rest of our vehicles.
We ended up camping off the east side of Oatman Hwy a few miles south of Boundary Cone, on BLM lands regularly used for this purpose. We ended up huddled in our camp chairs under the awning on Jim's RV, watching the rain come down harder, on and off. It was probably the most rain I've seen in the desert on any previous trip (mind you, I'm not in the desert during summertime and miss the occasional torrential thunderstorms at that time). There would be no campfire tonight and we would go off to sleep in our various vehicles earlier than usual...
Continued...
This page last updated: Sun Dec 26 17:03:35 2021
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