Sat, Dec 5, 2020
|
With: | Karl Fieberling |
Ryan Burd | |
Iris Ma | |
Tom Grundy | |
Tom Becht |
Tom B had joined the previous evening, making six of us to enjoy a fine campfire at our secluded spot along the Colorado River Aqueduct at the base of the Comxcomb Mountains. Today's outing was to a trio of summit in the southern half of the range, covering about 8mi with close to 3,000ft of gain. Unlike the previous day in the northern half where the terrain is much more challenging, the southern half has far less granite and is the more typical class 2 scrambling that one finds in expects in the CA desert ranges. Barbara and Gordon (along with Bill Sanders) had been to all three of these on a February day back in 1977. I had visited the highest of these, Coxbrush Peak, when I was in the area chasing down P1Ks six years earlier. Now my interests had become more general as I was working on climbing all the peaks in the range.
We started
shortly after 7a, right from our campsite which has also served as a
shooting range by other desert visitors. Perhaps the most unusual target here
was the shell of
a jet ski, now riddled with holes. The Joshua Tree
park boundary
is encountered soon after crossing a man-made gully created during the
construction of the aqueduct. We cruised up
a wide wash heading
southwest for about 25min before it began to
narrow and turn rockier.
We then
began to climb out of
the same wash, continuing
southwest until we
reached a ridgeline that would lead to our first
summit, Coxcomb BM. It was
a pleasant bit of exercise
along the ridge, nothing more than easy class 3, and that only in a
few places. We couldn't tell exactly where the summit was
from below,
relying more on the GPSr. Even with that I got the direction wrong, sending
Tom G on a roundabout way to the summit while
Iris figured it
out on her own and beat all of us to
the top before 9a.
The benchmark we found at the broad summit was placed by the
Metropolitan Water District in 1931 when surveying for
the aqueduct.
The water flows into a tunnel near our campsite, exiting 3mi later on the other
side of the range, one of a number of such tunnels constructed for the project.
We found the expected
MacLeod/Lilley register with perhaps a half dozen
additional entries, most recently
in 2012. From the summit,
one can
look west to see the aqueduct emerging from that side of the
range. Behind it to
the southwest is a huge solar array that continues
to grow in the west end of the Chuckwalla Valley. Our next two summits could
be seen to the south and southeast with a lot of terrain between them.
After a 20min break, we packed up and headed south for the highest
summit in this half of the range, Coxbrush Peak. It's a very pleasant stroll
along the connecting ridgeline with
a drop of less than 400ft between
them. It took about 45min to cover the 1.5mi distance between them. The
unofficial name derives from
the register placed by Gordon and Barbara.
Mark Adrian had left a second register here
in 2012. I had
signed the older register previously, but that one is getting a little
fragile, so we made use of
the newer one. As he had done on
the first summit, Karl sat himself a short distance from the rest of
us, perhaps to allow a more peaceful contempation of nature's
awesomeness, perhaps to let him
nap a little easier. Whichever it was,
it would take a bit of pushing to get him moving again, just a bit harder with
each summit we visited.
The third summit was about 300ft lower and some 2mi to the east now.
Unlike the obvious ridge we followed to Coxbrush, the terrain gets a little
complicated and it wasn't clear how to
follow the divide. It would take
another hour to get between
Coxbrush and
Coxdryer, some of us
(Tom G) doing a better job than others (Iris) in doing so efficiently. We would
traverse around some of the intermediate points, but it was easy to
then follow the wrong line as we searched out the saddle between the two peaks.
Last to arrive, Karl took up a
south-facing position to
contemplate life's many facets while
the rest of us shared more of
Iris' summit candy.
The register here was in a small metal
film cannister with a plastic lid, well-preserved and not opened since
1979. Barbara and Gordon had named this one as well, keeping with the theme
started by Coxbrush.
When it was time to leave, I led us down a fractured, steeply-inclined ridge to
the north. It was hardly the easiest way down, but I thought it made
for
a nice challenge with much completely unnecessary
class 3 scrambling before we finally
reached a wash at the
bottom. This led us out to
a much larger wash paralleling the one we
had originally ascended. To avoid a more circuitous route around the end of the
separating ridgeline, we went
over a low saddle along
the ridge and then back across
the original wash. We
finished up around 1:30p,
much earlier than expected, and had a short discussion on what to do next. We
considered driving east into the Granite Mtns to do some easy summits there,
but the hour-long drive each way discouraged us. The weather was quite nice
this afternoon so in the end we decided
to start our evening party a
few hours early. Tom had brought some nice snacks to get us started...
Continued...
This page last updated: Sun Dec 13 09:33:38 2020
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