Sat, Apr 11, 2020
|
With: | Tom Becht |
I had been intrigued by one of Adam Walker's trip reports that I'd stumbled
across in semi-random fashion. Part of a 20 peaks in 6 days effort back in 2019,
he had described a tricky attempt on Kelbaholt Peak, a name I'd never heard
before. It is located in the northern part of the Turtle Mtns that I had visited
a few years earlier. Like me, Adam had been there mainly to tag Carson BM, a
P1K. I recalled walking up a broad wash and noticing some impressive-looking
crags on both sides of the small valley. Kelbaholt was one of these,
unofficially named. More research found that it had seen a number of ascents
by DPS folks in the late 1970s through early 1990s, then went mostly quiet. The
name comes from the combination of three ascentionists from 1927 that had left
a type-written note at the summit. This and
other summits are
easily visible for
much of the drive in. Wondering which other points we might be able to climb in
the area, Tom and I planned to spend a day exploring the possibilities. We found
some really great scrambling and exploring, some of the best days either of us
had spent in the California desert.
It took only seconds for the big accident of the day. While distracted by his
phone, Tom attempted to step over the steel cable across the trail at the start
that was intended to keep vehicles out. His foot didn't clear it as expected
and he immediately went down, face first into the rocky trail. He let out a
sharp scream that had me looking back only a fraction of a second after he'd hit
the ground. His glasses were off to one side and his face was nuzzled against
the trunk of a decaying cactus. I suggested he roll over first before getting
up so that I could examine his injuries. He looked pretty good despite the hard
fall, so I declared, "Doesn't look bad at all," before snapping
a picture before he
could stand. He had some minor bleeding on his legs and would complain about
bruising on his face later in the day, but it never got discolored and it seemed
he got off only a little worse for the wear.
After dusting himself off and recollecting his things, we headed off again,
aiming southwest directly for Kelbaholt. It's NE Face looks difficult from a
distance and doesn't appear to have many options even as we approached
the base (it was only after we got to the summit that we thought to download a
GPX track that Tracy Fouts had posted on PB). Our best guess was that the route
would go up a narrow gully ramping right to left, found on the left side of
the NE Face. We made a somewhat sketchy
class 3-4 start to get
to the bottom of
this gully, only to discover the top portion looked
to go nearly vertical and not all that inviting. I suggested checking to the
left (south) of this for other options and that turned out to be the key. It
led to the far left side of the NE Face where a standard class 3 route presented
itself as the only logical option. It
turned back to the right where we
reached the edge of a cliff, scrambling up through
a notch and then up
a series of
short gullies, well ducked now and not hard to follow.
Working our way west up the face, the route then
turns south when due
north of the highpoint which is out of view for most of the ascent. There is
a downclimb of about 100ft on a wide, loose rock ramp to get around
difficulties along the North Ridge. One then has several options to climb back
up. The easier way we discovered on the descent is to move to the left and climb
directly to the summit, all class 2. We chose a route more to the right that
returned us to
the North Ridge and more difficult
scrambling,
though not unpleasant. It was a fun, highly enjoyable effort that took us almost
two hours to complete, landing us on
the summit by 9:30a. I found 1/2
of a nested set of rusty cans about 10ft below the summit, the other tucked
under the summit cairn. It's exposed contents consisted of two badly shredded
paper scraps, mostly illegible, all that was left of the summit
register. This was a little disappointing as I'd held out this vague hope that
we might find the original note from 1927. We left a
new register while
we sat about the summit enjoying our success.
Our high perch among these craggy features was quite satisfying as we
considered our next moves. There were other summits looking north, a few of
which we knew Adam had climbed already. This was the direction we had originally
planned, but as we looked south, there were options there that looked enticing.
In particular,
Peak 3,687ft which has the same surveyed height as
Kelbaholt, looked like it had a viable route up from what we could see. It lies
less than half a mile south of Kelbaholt, but the intervening geography is very
complicated and it was far from obvious that we could even reach the base of the
peak. But it seemed like a fine adventure and we resolved to give it a try.
After returning to the saddle with Peak 3,339ft, we began our return
to the TH by descending
the SE side of the saddle into the major
drainage between our peaks and Carson BM. This easy
class 2 route would
occupy the last hour or so of our day, following
the main wash heading
north, then picking up
a faint BLM trail that we could mostly follow
back to the jeeps. It would be after 5p before we were done and ready
to start
the recuperation process. We had
planned only to spend the one day in this area before heading to the Whipple
Mtns, but Tom was quickly receptive to my suggestion that we could spend
another day here. This made for a lot less driving. After showering, we settled
in at the Lisa Dawn Campground about 3/4mi away, closer to Lost Arch Mine Peak.
Though primitive with no water or toilet facilities, it had a covered metal
picnic bench and some flat camp spots that we'd have to ourselves, and free,
too. A very fine day overall...
Continued...
This page last updated: Sat Sep 5 14:38:03 2020
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