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| Hiking | 9.70 Miles |
2,792 AEG |
| | Hiking | 9.70 Miles | 7 Hrs 15 Mns | | 1.34 mph |
| 2,792 ft AEG | | | | |
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| no partners | | I had been thinking about this one for a while. It is an interesting looking peak with an interesting history (check out Nobert15's excellent description). The fight with the Indians on top of Turret Peak apparently gave rise to the common name of this area (Bloody Basin) and it is a major high point looking over this part off the Verde valley.
I took a recon trip to the peak last year and found out that the road system in is a little tricky (I got it wrong) and that in lieu of a jeep it might be fun to approach the mountain by going over rather than around Rugged Mesa.
The turnoff to the left for FR44 is ~17 mi. from I-17 and the road is marked with a FR44 sign, I went almost a mile down this rough road with high clearance before deciding "good enough". I walked the jeep road about 0.5mi to a junction and then headed off cross country up the side of Rugged Mesa. It's a little steep but once on top it was pretty good walking in the rocky grassland. There were only a few signs that the area had burned in the past. I spooked 3 does on top of the mesa.
Eventually Turret Peak comes into view. I had stayed on the right side of the mesa and it was a steep drop to the saddle. It looked like the descent would have been a little better if I'd have taken the "left fork" at the mesa end. From the end of the mesa until leaving the peak by entering Bishop Creek in a couple hours, it's steep bushwacking through the scrub.
Reaching the actual summit requires a bit of scrambling. I had good luck going up from the left, a little ways down from first contacting the rock. More skillful scramblers could probably go directly SW to NE right over the summit and on to the long "table" beyond the summit.
The summit doesn't get a lot of visitors. The "weathered" scraps of paper showed a group of Boy Scouts in 2011 and 2012; the only other legible names were a pair of hikers from March 2012. Great views from on top.
I had hoped to look around the summit area for "signs of history" but the table-area was heavily overgrown and there was nothing easily found. Like Nobert15 I took the direct route down to (dry) Bishop Creek which looked like a pretty line of colored trees from above. I saw another deer along the way and a buck in the creek drainage. Walking the creek was a lot nicer than the bushwacking and the drainage is open enough that there was minimal tree limb ducking. There were a few pools of water and I saw several large carnivore "scat piles" which I was curious about but couldn't identify.
The creek led to FR44 (nobert15's jeep-enabled starting point) and I headed out the road back to my car.
I'm glad I got this one out of my system and it's pretty country with great views, but the steep bushwacking is a negative. |
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Route Editor
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