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| Hiking | 16.51 Miles |
6,223 AEG |
| | Hiking | 16.51 Miles | 10 Hrs 57 Mns | | 1.75 mph |
| 6,223 ft AEG | 1 Hour 31 Mns Break | | | |
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| no partners | | A tour of the main peaks of the park.
Despite having family just walking distance from the Preserve, I had yet to wander much farther north than Sunrise. That said, I had wanted to check out Thompson's Peak for some time and although I would have preferred a better weather window (temps in the valley peaked somewhere in the low 30s C), I was leaving town the following day. I didn't worry too much about working out an exact route in advance, resting assured that the scrambling and routefinding wouldn't be too bad thanks to a trip report of Stav.
Still sore and lazy from hiking in the Superstitions two days earlier, I pulled up to the Sunrise trailhead well after sunrise (~08:30 to be exact) with the intent of following the evident ridgeline from just north of Sunrise Peak all to Bell's Pass, from there excursing to McDowell Peak and Drinkwater Peak should sufficient time and enthusiasm remain. This was in hindsight a fairly late start for the hike that I had in mind—and a very late start for the hike that I actually ended up doing—but the many well-marked exits in the vicinity gave me the confidence to keep pushing north.
The first leg of the trip was routine. I accessed Sunrise Peak via Sunrise trail, subsequently continuing north along the Andrews-Kinsey trail. As usual, I encountered several other hikers on my way up, both ascending and descending. At ~09:30 I met one last hiker heading south on A-K, after which I saw no one else, not even from a distance, until dusk (~18:00).
After heading north some ~6km on the A-K trail, I reached a saddle of the aforementioned ridgeline, just below 900m in elevation. There I ditched the trail for the ridgeline, trekking directly up the moderately steep incline, aided by the many mostly-stable boulders which afforded great traction and ample handholds. A while of this got me to "Peak 3585", and a bit of descent followed by more of the same led to Peak 3805. Intriguingly, there were not only a couple of large cairns at the summit but even a faint social trail leading down the ridgeline toward the saddle between Peaks 3805 and 3702. The terrain on this entire portion of the trip was excellent; there was little scree, few moving rocks, and for the most part only a moderate amount of brush.
Having reached this saddle, the next item on the agenda was to summit Peak 3702, a.k.a. "Doubletop". It was apparent looking ahead that the routefinding would not be quite as trivial as it had been earlier in the day. Moreover, the uniquely rhyolitic surface composition of 3702, responsible for its strikingly pale and rugged appearance when viewed from afar, made for a smoother and more fragmented substrate and consequently a more haphazard scramble upwards. Even so, the straightforward route up (i.e., dodging any sheer surfaces to the east, but otherwise gaining as much elevation as possible) worked like a charm, and it wasn't long before I found myself at the two summits, the lesser of which was marked by a single lamp head(?) wedged into some rocks to point toward the sky. The route down was similar, though where it was hard to judge from above the feasibility of scrambling down a vertical drop, I simply descended west and (if necessary) south, eventually finding myself on a well-worn social trail leading to a pullout on Thompson's Peak Road.
I then followed the road to the peak, marveling that any vehicle could safely traverse even the paved portion given its near-100% grade. It was nice to finally see the radio towers in person, but I didn't dwell long—I wanted to be back at my vehicle well before sunset (lol) and it was already 12:48. Instead, I immediately began the tedious but mostly uneventful descent to Bell's Pass, which included ascending and descending landmark 3515. (Which, I confess, I had initially mistaken for a shadow.) Though occasional winds had done a decent job of tempering the midday heat, I was really beginning to feel it, and decided to postpone any final decision on pushing onward to McDowell Peak until after I had reached Bell's Pass. I arrived there ~14:00.
After taking a few minutes' break, I felt decent enough to attempt to make it to the Peak. The route up proved to be nothing unusual given what had preceded it, a pleasant surprise given its apparent relative steepness on the topo. I was a little surprised by the lack of any survey marker (though there was a solar-powered emergency call station), but I figured that I'd have plenty of time to search for it when I returned from the short traverse over to Drinkwater Peak (3914). Well, at least I intended that the traverse be short—in fact, it ate up a surprising amount of crucial time given the two peaks' apparent proximity and while the views of Scottsdale were certainly better than those from McDowell, they were nothing special compared to those from the days' other peaks.
While resting and Googling the summit marker issue on Drinkwater, I learned to my horror that McDowell Peak, despite its name, was *not* the high point of the range. Rather East End, still some several kms to the north, was. To call this a huge bummer would be a massive understatement; the whole point of this trip was to complete a "McDowell Ridgeline", bagging all the major peaks of interest in the process, and yet here I was omitting the most significant one. I stewed over this failure all the way along the traverse back to McDowell Peak, reaching it at ~15:50. The rational decision would have of course been to call it a day then, hoping to make it back to my car before sunset. At the last moment, however, I made the decision to descend McDowell Peak north instead of south, postponing any irreversible decision on whether to complete the full ridgeline until my reaching Windgate Pass.
Thus I began the trudge down to the Pass, which at first involved some mild downclimbing but quickly resolved to a stroll down a grassy slope. At one point I found myself immediately to the left of an old—but intact—wire fence which I followed it down to the Pass, reaching it at ~16:40. From there I took a short rest, gathering up the courage to commit to the full ridgeline. Shortly after, I continued up to the Lookout, this time on the right side of the continuation of that same fence I had followed earlier. I had worried initially about the apparently steeper grade and looser substrate (judging from a distance) of this ascent relative to those of the previous peaks, but the route that I had scouted from McDowell Peak (following the evident wash above and to the west, traversing it at the last possible moment, and then emerging on a relatively grassy slope leading up to the Lookout) went without a hitch. There was some slickrock in the wash, but nothing particularly noteworthy. I was a little surprised to see a cairn near the top of this stretch—evidently the route that I had found wasn't as original as I had imagined.
At the lookout, I paused to take another break, really regretting not packing extra food. Indeed, I had exhausted the last of what I had brought all the way back on McDowell Peak, not anticipating the long day that it had turned out to be. I decided to watch the sunset from the Lookout (at 17:30 almost on the dot), and then quickly made my way along the Lookout trail to the junction with Tom's Thumb trail.
This I reached about 18:00, and there was just enough light out for me to begin ascending East End peak. I had read on HAZ that there was a spur trail leading to it, but I had wrongly assumed that it was like the faint social trails that I had encountered earlier in the day. Moreover, the evident gully strewn with large blocks of granite appeared quite difficult to penetrate from the south below, so I instead opted to forge my own way directly up to the peak instead of bothering to find the spur trail. This led to some confusing backtracking and squeezing through cracks, but I eventually made it to the summit (~18:30) just as the last of twilight was fading. It was only when I passed the solar panel installation that it became just how well-worn the spur trail that I had not bothered to look for was. At least the descent back to Tom's Thumb trail was easy.
The descent via Tom's Thumb trail to Tom's Thumb trailhead was likewise straightforward, and I was on the way back to where I was staying by ~19:00.
I'm glad that I managed to hit all the highlights of the Preserve, even if the views I enjoyed from East End would have been much nicer with the sun still out. No doubt this hike could be made substantially more enjoyable with proper planning in advance. On balance, however, I'm quite content with how things turned out. |
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