The last day of a 5-day roadtrip found us in the Panamints of Death Valley,
the park's highest range with well over 100 summits. I had been to Wildrose Peak
almost a decade earlier when the peak was covered in snow. Today there would be
no such hindrance. Tom had not been to Wildrose and was keen on visiting it -
Ryan was more or less along for the ride on his first visit to the park. I was
interested in a handful of minor summits around Wildrose, so didn't mind the
return visit. It would be an adventurous outing, almost 12mi total with only two
miles on trail. We set up a car shuttle that would leave us with 3,600ft of gain
and 6,000ft of descent. Most of the latter would come at the end of the outing
when making the long descent from the last summit. We left two vehicles at
the 5,800-foot level in Wildrose Canyon and drove my Jeep up past the
charcoal kilns
to the campground at Mahogany Flat which would serve as our jumping off
point. It was 7:30a in chilly conditions when we 
started out
heading northeast along the crest of the range.
Our first stop was the highpoint of 
Colville Ridge,
which runs east off the
main crest. It was 2.5mi from our starting point and would take us an hour and
a half. The route begins along the crest for almost a mile, a use trail of
sorts making it easy to travel through the pinyon and juniper forest. We then
chose to traverse across the south side of Pt. 8,335ft to save us some elevation
gain and loss. Our route went across what would have been an unpleasant talus
slope if it hadn't been for the fortuitous find of 
a ducked route
across the
slope, a trail having developed over time - who would have guessed that this
would be a semi-popular route? We then had a 500-foot drop 
to a saddle
along Colville Ridge, followed by nearly a mile of ridgewalking to find the
highpoint at its eastern end. Tom seemed full of energy this morning and easily
beat Ryan and I to 
the top. It seemed a very remote location that few
would bother to visit, but a busy register told another story. Dating
to 2001, it contained 13 page of entries, the 
most recent not
a week earlier. Crowded mountains, these.
After 
a nice break to soak in 
views and sun, we returned back
along the ridge to the crest of the range. The hard part of this leg
was the 1,000-foot climb from the low saddle up 
the talus slope to
Pt. 8,335ft. Ugh, ugh. Once 
at the point, it was a more pleasant hike
to the second summit, Peak 8,380ft, about a quarter mile northwest of Pt.
8,335ft. We spent an hour and a quarter getting between the 1st and 2nd summits.
Unlike Colville Ridge, Peak 8,380ft's 
summit was buried in forest with
nary a view. It, too, had a register, this one dating 
to 1989. It
appears to have been left by Andy Smatko judging by the handwriting, but it
seems he forgot to add his name to the date and peak name he bestowed,
"Pinjuni Mtn" (likely the combination of Pinyon and Juniper). The register and
various 
scraps suggest it is equally as popular as Colville Ridge.
We spent the next half hour descending 
the north side of Peak 8,380ft
along the crest to reach 
a saddle where we knew we could pick up
the Wildrose Trail. It seemed like this would the easiest part of the
day following it to the summit of Wildrose, but it felt much harder - probably
because we had something like 1,400ft of gain over those two miles. The
cross-country effort would have been much tougher. There is another summit,
Peak 7,913ft, another mile and a half to the northeast off a spur
ridgeline, but we decided to skip that one - I was
more interested in the last summit and was afraid we (I) might not have the
energy for it if we went to Peak 7,913ft. It was 11:45a by the time we topped
out 
on Wildrose Peak at just over 9,000ft. At the
wide-open summit there was a large pile of talus, 
a benchmark,
and an ammo box holding a register that wasn't
even a month old and already very busy. This is a very popular peak.
The 
next stretch to 
Peak 8,740ft was pretty tame, about a
mile and a half with more downhill than up. We 
traversed below the top
of Pt. 8,700ft on the south side, not as easy as the one we'd done earlier, but
still saving us some effort. Most of the route along the ridgeline after that
was easy, 
open cross-country. There are two summits to Peak 8,740ft,
separated by about 800ft. Tom bypassed the northeast summit while Ryan and I
went over it, all of us enroute to the LoJ point to the southwest.
When we got to 
the southwest point we found no register and couldn't
tell which was higher. Tom decided to go back to the northeast summit "just in
case." Ryan and I relaxed on 
the open summit of whitish rock while
waiting for Tom's return. Upon rejoining us, he said the other summit was lower.
I thought the most interesting part of the day was the descent off Peak 8,740ft.
We had initially planned to continue following the ridge to the southwest, but
I thought it looked too rocky and more tedium than it was worth. I suggested
we descend more directly 
to the south even though we couldn't tell what
the terrain looked like, other than being obviously very steep. I poo-poohed
concerns that Tom had of running into cliffs, figuring it was a big face and
we'd find a way down. The initial part had lots of 
broken rock and
loose talus and was seeming like the tediousness I feared for the
ridge. Our route then began to 
funnel down more steeply into a narrow
channel with some stout 
class 3 scrambling that we found quite fun.
In 
traversing out of 
one gully, Tom got ahead of us and was
soon out of sight. He would find more open slopes that allowed for a quicker
descent and would beat us back to the vehicles by 15-20min. Ryan and I returned
to 
the main gully and continued 
the class 3 scrambling that
went on and on. I kept expecting to run into a dry waterfall,
but each obstacle seemed to have a class 3 way through it. Eventually we did
run into a 60-foot drop, but this was bypassed without much difficulty to one
side before continuing down the gully. Eventually, after dropping more than
1,800ft, we emerged into 
the side canyon that would drop down to out
vehicles in Wildrose Canyon. This involved another 800ft of descent, but it was
all class 2, mostly in a dry, gravelly wash.
Tom had already showered and changed into fresh clothes before
we arrived shortly before 3p. It had been a long, hard day, but a good
one. Tom shared his last beers with us 
as reward before we would set
out for the long drive home.
After finishing our beers, we said goodbye to Ryan who would beat all of us
home in the evening. Tom drove me back up to Mahogany Flat and my Jeep. After
Tom drove off, I took a shower before starting my own drive home. I had the
longest drive of the three of us and wouldn't get home until after 11p that
evening. That made for a rather long day...