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| | | Painted Rock - Agua Caliente, AZ | | | |
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Painted Rock - Agua Caliente, AZ
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| Hiking | 9.40 Miles |
1,642 AEG |
| | Hiking | 9.40 Miles | | | |
| 1,642 ft AEG | | | | |
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| no partners | | Today I decided to head out to the desert west of Gila Bend and hike up to a couple of mountain range highpoints:
1) Painted Rock Mountains HP
2) Agua Caliente Mountains HP, aka Morris 1240 or Morris Benchmark
Painted Rock
I took Painted Rock Road north of I-8 for about 2.5 miles and where the road made a curve to the right I turned onto a dirt road. I was going to park there, but the road was really well graded and there was no signage restricting access, so I drove a mile or so and parked just before the road made a 90 degree turn to the left.
From where I parked, I hiked about 100 yards or so on the road, and then went through open desert for about 2.5 miles to the base of the mountain. This was an easy walk through the desert -- it was flat and the only vegetation was an occasional creosote bush. It was a fun climb and scramble up to the summit: there was a bit of route finding but the hike was nothing difficult or sketchy. It was a bit steep in places, so I took my time.
Views were nice at the summit so I stayed up there for a bit. I saw a height of light at the summit, but I did not see any flivers.
Agua Caliente
This one was near the town of Hyder, which is basically a ghost town. I parked on the road near some railroad tracks, and had to walk back down the road for a short distance to head up to the peak. The hike was on an old washed out road that had a number of switchbacks going up to the summit. I was hiking on a lot of basalt rocks, and it wasn't a terribly exciting hike. The views were nice at the summit, and I hung around a bit and located both reference marks, but I did not see the benchmark (I think that it was covered up by a large summit cairn). I had the GPS coordinates for an azimuth mark that was near the road where I parked, but I forgot to look for it. ](https://hikearizona.com/dex2/images/smilies/eusa_wall.gif "Brick wall")
I was the 3rd person this century to sign the summit register log, so it does not appear that this one is hiked very frequently. I had a funny feeling that I might have been on private land part of the way up, but I am not certain.
Synopsis
I enjoyed the Painted Rock hike -- the open desert portion was not exciting, but the scramble up to the summit was kinda fun. It was just a road walk up to the Agua Caliente HP, and I would not recommend that one unless you are trying to bag AZ mountain range highpoints.
Distance and elevation gain for the 2 hikes are below. Stats above are the sum of the 2.
Painted Rock: 6.31 miles with 792 feet of elevation gain
Agua Caliente: 3.09 miles with 850 feet of elevation gain |
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| Civilization is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there |
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