Tom and I had camped about a mile west of US95 on the utility road heading towards the Stepladder Mtns. We drove in two vehicles to keep with social distancing guidelines, part our effort to continue peakbagging in the era of COVID19. I had been to the DPS Stepladder Mtn 12yrs earlier and had agreed to repeat it for Tom's sake as one of the bones I would occasional toss him for following me around on the more obscure desert summits. We would do some other summits in the area to make a full day of it. A late-season storm had stalled over Southern California bringing moisture and cool temps to the desert in early April. This had the unpleasant effect of wetting the brush and grasses we walked through, leaving our boots and feet soaked for most of the day. The occasional light rain would mean tossing our rain jackets on one moment, removing them the next. This was more than compensated by the greening of the desert landscape and profusion of wildflowers that delighted us all day. Our main outing covered 12.5mi and more than 2,000ft of prominence, keeping us busy for 7.5hrs. On our drive back out we stopped to tackle a last summit just off the roadway that had almost 800ft of prominence.
Stepstool - Conical BM - Stepladder
The drive to the Stepladder Mtns is fairly long, about 9mi on a
good gasline road
heading west from Lobecks Pass, then 5.5mi south on a lesser road. The
gasline road had ongoing work being done on several sections of the buried
pipeline, though there were no workers present when we passed through the
fenced sections
erected to keep endangered desert tortoises from invading the
worksites. The 
lesser road heading south is a little hard to find
(though signed with a BLM roadmarker if one looks carefully), so it helped to
have the GPSr to nail down the location. The road is less brushy than I
remember from 12yrs earlier, but it is somewhat slow and bumpy as it goes
against the grain of the land, in and out of countless small washes. The road
is closed at the Wilderness boundary about 4mi from Stepladder Mtn, leaving a
long, though not unpleasant walk 
across the desert to reach the base of
the mountain. We made Stepladder the last stop of our loop, visiting a
closer and lower summit to the SE first. Most of the route was the
usual class 2, save for some 
class 3 scrambing at the top. With
overcast skies and precipitation seen in most directions, it would not be a good
day for pictures or 
views. From the summit, 
Stepladder stood
out as the highest summit around, less than mile to the WNW. We left
a register atop this first peak, dubbing it Stepstool Peak, a play on
the range's namesake.
After descending the 
class 3 section, we moved southeast and then
descended 
the southwest side of the peak on our way to Conical BM
which could be seen as the highest point in 
the southern part of the
range. It would have also been possible to descend directly off the west or
southwest side of Stepstool, but
we couldn't see the breaks in the cliffs there until we had viewed them during
our descent. We landed in a wash, following this 
south for a quarter
mile or so before exiting to begin our climb up Conical BM. The terrain on this
second peak was more rugged than the first, requiring a bit more effort. We
ascended 
a wide gully northeast of the summit as it seemed to offer
the most
straightforward way up. The gully became steeper and more class 3 as we got
higher, eventually leading to a small saddle on the north side of the peak. The
last stretch up the North Ridge was more standard class 2 fare, getting us to
the top shortly after 11a. The wooden survey tower 
still stood at the
summit,
rusty guywires holding it up over what must be many decades now. We knew that
Gordon McLeod had climbed Conical BM back in 1971, but alas we were unable to
find the hoped-for register hidden in the summit cairn. We left
a new one,
adding Gordon's name at the top, before starting back down. There were several
other rugged peaks between Conical and Stepladder that appear on LoJ, but
these would not be easy objectives on the way to Stepladder, so we decided to
leave them for a future visit.
After descending back to the high saddle north of Conical BM, we chose an
alternate descent line down a narrower gully to the north. This proved to be a
more enjoyable way than our ascent line. It led down to the same wash system
we'd used earlier, this time 
heading north and following it for more
than a mile as it turns northwest to bring us to 
the east side of
Stepladder Mtn. We followed the standard DPS route up that side, what looks
like a stiff little scramble from a distance but is really much easier. There
is some short class 3 moves on 
the lower parts of the cliffs but
quickly leads to 
some long ledges that are easy class 2, almost like
they were designed for the purposed. The route has been 
amply ducked
and by 1p we had found our way to 
the top. Though the topo map shows a
spot elevation at the northern of two summits, the southern
one is clearly higher. The DPS register is found at the base of the highest
point which requires some modest class 3 scrambling to surmount. The register
in the ammo box had been left 
in 1999 by a large DPS party (there's a
TR in their archives describing the debauchery that accompanied them). Oddly, I
could find no sign of my previous 2008 ascent. Later, I noted from my earlier
TR that there had been an older summit register, now gone. I had probably signed
into
that one rather than the newer book from 1999. Before heading back down, Tom
watched while I spent about 15min exploring route options for the north summit.
Matthew and I had failed on the previous visit and I wondered if I had any
better skills than I possessed then. I did a much better job of exploring
options, but all of them ended in extremely dicey sections of crappy rock -
apparently my skills were no better than 12yrs ago. We descended back down the
regular route, then made 
our way back across the flats to
our jeeps parked miles away. It was now 3:40p, but I still had one
more idea for the day that Tom was easily talked into.
Big Chief BM
This
last summit is a short distance north of the pipeline road, 2.5mi
west of the junction with the road leading to Stepladder. Barbara and Gordon
had been to the summit in 1984. It took us less than 30min to reach the top via
class 2 slopes on the south side, about half of it through a large
cholla garden. We found 
a cairn and the remains of a survey
tower, but no sign of a register. We added both their names to
a new register we left before heading back down via a slight variation
of the ascent route. We 
finished up
shortly after 5:30p, calling it a day. We showered, put on some
fresh clothes and opened a few cold ones before driving off to the Turtle Mtns
where we would spent the next few days. We spent the night camped off Turtle Mtn
Rd a few miles from US95 where we would still have cell coverage. It was a
lonely stretch of road and we would not be bothered by other vehicles the rest
of the evening and night...
Continued...