Continued...
Tom and I were camped on the Jean Dry Lake Bed, northeast of Jean, NV. The
site is semi-popular with the OHV folks, though there were only a few others
sharing it with us on a weekday in November. We were here to visit a collection
of summits in the McCullough Range south of Las Vegas. Adam Walker had done
these eight summits earlier in the year in a large loop that must have occupied
him for all the available daylight and then some. We would use the Jeep to make
an easier day, especially for the last two summits where the Jeep really helped.
The weather today was overcast with strong winds, temperatures on the cool side,
but we were still in t-shirts all day.
Tortoise Foot Hill - Bad Hill
These two summits are found in Purcell's
Rambles & Scrambles, which is
why I chose this area. We parked off the 4WD road that goes up the gravel wash
between the two peaks and hiked them in turn - 20min to of
, 50min , 20min for the return.
Both summits are volcanic in nature with dark,
and boulders ubiquitous throughout
the area. Both were named by Purcell - one for the remains of a tortoise
carcass he found on the peak, the other for words scratched into a boulder near
the top.
Peak 4,292ft - Peak 3,934ft - Peak 4,027ft - Peak 4,060ft
These four summits are found east of the first two. We drove a mile further up
the wash before parking below a saddle, north of Peak 4,060ft. We would hike
to the four peaks in a large square in a six mile loop. In the middle of our
loop is an that we could see for much of the outing, a
few trucks coming and going, but not a lot of activity. We started by
along the road, leaving it to head east towards
Peak 4,292ft, crossing the paved on the way. Peak 4,292ft
has more than 800ft of prominence and lies roughly midway along the range's
length. We ascended the to reach the summit in an hour's
time. We left here before continuing off the south side of
the peak. The peak is ringed with cliffs on this side, as we found the first
scrambling of the day with a few class 3 sections to downclimb. After descending
the , we found harder cliffs below, so moved onto a broad
ledge on the west side hoping for an exit. More cliffs , but
there was a neat, through that saved
us considerable backtracking. We then descended more typical
, around Pt. 3,881ft on its east side, then down to
north of .
Upon crossing the wash, we immediately began up to Peak
3,934ft from the north, noting a ring of cliffs about the very top.
Formidible-looking from a distance, it proved to have several challenging class
3 options through the cliff. We went up we encountered,
it's 3-4 minutes to . We hung around
a bit, per usual, then went to descend, intending to take the same route. I was
partway down just to the east before I realized it
wasn't our ascent route. It worked anyway, about the same difficulty as the
ascent route. We then traversed of the cliff to
retrieve my poles I'd left there, then went . The
rest of the outing was all class 2, about 40min to go up and over
, then another hour north to . This
last peak has a large , the highpoint somewhere at
, not very satisfying as a peak. Our route back to the
Jeep was fairly short, about 35min the North Ridge to where
. Not yet 2p, we decided to add the last
two peaks which I didn't expect we'd have time for today.
Hole BM
The last two peaks are found south of the previous group. They command an
orthogonal ridge that separates two passes over the range, over which travel
numerous transmission towers originating at Hoover Dam and delivering electric
power to California. Service roads go over both passes, along the routes of
the power lines. We had to drive back out to the edge of Jean Dry Lake and
around Bad Hill to access the road going over the lower pass north of these
peaks. From Peak 3,934ft, we had seen spur roads climbing high on both peaks
and expected we could drive within a few hundred yards of Hole BM on the north
side. We ended up only getting within about 0.4mi due to a pile of rock
deliberately placed across the road to bar access further up. We
near a transmission tower and hiked up to
we'd hoped to park at, then to
, about 20min all told. We found the remains of the
in a cairn, under which presumeably could be found the
benchmark. We left before descending, using a slightly more
direct route to to the Jeep by 3:30p.
Peak 4,380ft
More driving took us up a rough spur road to a tower perched on Peak 4,380ft's
North Ridge - we found no rock piles blocking the road, but it was much rougher
than the previous one. , we had only a few hundred feet of
over the course of about half a mile along
. There is found at the north
end of the summit ridge (though oddly, no spot elevation reported here on the
topo map), but the highpoint is found at , another
6-7min of easy walking. It was now 4:20p, only a few minutes before sunset. We
were treated to some nice as we headed back down, the
overhead clouds taking on of color with the setting sun.
It would be quite dark
before we managed to get back to our camp on Jean Dry Lake, leaving us one
last puzzle - finding where we'd left Tom's truck. We hadn't saved any
waypoints as to the location, thinking we'd be back in daylight when it would
be easy to spot. We did, of course, eventually locate it, saving Tom the
bother of sleeping rough outside in the cold...
Continued...