Continued...
The last day of a short desert road trip saw us tooling around in the Sacramento
Mountains southwest of Needles, CA. We had originally planned for some
scrambling opportunities in the Whipple Mtns, but that was the opposite
direction to which Tom planned to head after I went home. So we went for an
easier option, driving the backroads of the Sacramento Range. Tom was happy
exploring the roads in his jeep while I was happy to pick up some stragglers I'd
missed on previous visits here. We drove our own vehicles in keeping with
social distancing guidelines during these strange COVID-19 times. None of the
day's summits had any technical challenges, all class 2.
Peak 2,871ft
This was the only peak in which either of had any interest, sporting more than
800ft of prominence. Adam Walker and pals had visited a few years earlier. We
drove up a sandy wash to Monumental Pass on the of the peak.
We parked where the jeep trail comes closest, about a mile due south of the
summit. We went up one of on that side and down
to the west of our ascent route. We took 45min to reach the
open, rounded summit with a fine view of Eagle Peak (the most prominent summit
in the range) to . As expected, we found
left by Adam under
. It had only a thin plastic tube to hold the loose piece
of paper so we left one of that should last a little longer.
Peak 2,641ft
About five miles west of Peak 2,871ft, this summit lies out by itself off the
west side of the range and the easiest of the day at less than a quarter mile
each way. On the drive there, we passed through the site of an
with a deep, sealed vertical nearby.
An old road goes up from (don't try to drive it or
you may end up on the rocky, steep
hillside with a difficult turnaround. The road disappears and a trail emerges
near the summit to take one to the top. An antenna of some sort used to reside
at the summit. It can be seen fallen off the east side with
of
the tower still at the summit. Barbara and Gordon had been to the peak back in
1984, but we found no sign of their usual register. We of our
own before .
Peak 2,500ft
We drove further north, utilizing utility roads going north and east to reach
a point about a mile and quarter . The Bigelow
Cholla Garden Wilderness lies on of where we parked.
Though the south side in the direction of our peak is not Wilderness, no roads
were available to get us closer. The peak is the highpoint of a minor side ridge
off the main body of the range. A pleasant walk across the
gets one to the of the
summit, about 45min each way. We flushed out on
our way there, not so unusual, but this one stopped a short distance from
us to check us out, long enough to get a picture. Normally they tear off into
the distance and pictures are impossible. On via a slight
variation, we ran across a roadrunner's nest hidden in the brush. Mom came
scampering out to from the nest. If there were eggs or
small chicks in there somewhere, we didn't see them.
Peak 2,903ft
This last summit is found just off Interstate 40 near the north end of the
range. The easiest way to climb it would have been to park off
and climb the half mile distance from there. I decided to make it a legal
affair since it was only 1p and our last summit, so we did 2.5mi approach
. was another long, flat walk, pleasant
enough with lots of and not a single cholla though we were
well within the Wilderness. We found left by Mark Adrian
six months earlier and signed our names to it. The most interesting find of the
day was an old, from the late 1940s lying
in a sandy wash. It had a CA license plate and
in better shape than most such finds. As I went to peer in the open door on the
driver's side, I instinctively jumped back when I heard the familiar rattle
sound. A very large rattlesnake had made itself at home
inside.
After the initial fright, we tried to flush it out with a stick, only to get it
to move into the engine compartment. The hood had two doors that open from the
side, so I flipped one of these up to see if the snake could be found. It was,
and not happy at all, coiled in
and ready to strike if we
got too close. The snake was probably two inches in diameter and three feet
long, and we wondered just how far could it jump out at us. We took a few photos
before reclosing the hood to leave the snake be. The inside of the car and
engine bay looked to have been home to generations of rodents that had nested
inside, only to have been driven out by the snake. He seemed a clever one, fat
and healthy as any desert rattler could hope to be. We came across a few more
on our way back including a second, smaller
. I
don't think I'd seen even half a dozen snakes in the hundreds of days I'd spent
in the desert and here I'd come across two within an hour. We were
to the
jeeps by 3:30p to call it a day. Tom headed off to the Old Woman Mtns while
I started for home. I only made it as far as the Central Valley, stopping to
rest for the night around 11p when I was still several hours from home...