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| Hiking | 9.50 Miles |
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| | Hiking | 9.50 Miles | 5 Hrs 30 Mns | | 1.73 mph |
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| no partners | | Looked like an interesting area so I just went up to look around. The map shows the north trailing ridge of Hutch Mesa hits the Bloody Basin Rd. at ~5000' elevation and from there it doesn't look like much work to gain the mesa top.
It's about 17mi in from I-17 and there is an obvious parking area on the right side of the road (also a jeep road to somewhere (?) starts there).
It was straight forward walking up the ridge. A faint trail exists on the lower part and a little scrambling was needed in one place. As I got higher I wondered what to do? Look for the top! Well I walked to all the highpoints I could make out but didn't see anything resembling summit markings. When I got to the SE tip (which I reckoned to be the top -although I see now the topo map disagrees) I decided to build my own little cairn. I also decided to continue on to the satellite mesa further to the SE and from there on to the slightly higher mesa (5743) back to the SW.
This was all fine, nice views into the Verde Valley, north to Pine Mountain, and south and west toward interesting topography of many minor peaks and mesas. I had a snack on top of mesa 5743 and thought to myself that it was not surprising I hadn't found ancient habitation signs (other than one or two isolated pottery sherds). After all I was 1500-2000' higher than where the nearby Perry Mesans lived and pretty far from water. Anyway, as I started my return trip, a few minutes later I noticed a concentration of broken pottery pieces and a ring of rocks about 10' in dia. This is a pretty clear sign that there was an outpost on top of this mesa, possibly used to relay signals.
I retraced my path off of 5743 intersecting the jeep road that passes through the area. I walked the road back over Hutch Mesa and when it dropped down to the east I kept left on the ridge back to the car. |
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Route Editor
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