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| Hiking | 14.41 Miles |
1,817 AEG |
| | Hiking | 14.41 Miles | 7 Hrs 50 Mns | | 2.43 mph |
| 1,817 ft AEG | 1 Hour 54 Mns Break | | | |
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| partners | | I was looking at a few routes in the Superstitions today, but after the snow this past week, I wasn't sure if I'd end up dealing with snowy and/or muddy trails, so the Maricopa Mountains were the backup plan. We could see Peak 3272 from miles away, mostly recognizable because of the hoodoos north of the peak that stand out on the ridgeline.
We parked at an unlabeled dirt pullout off the south side of Hwy 238, and it was a chilly morning in the upper 30s when we set out. We immediately crossed the train tracks and crawled under a barbed wire fence, and we narrowly missing having to wait for a train to pass. We connected with a jeep trail that took a roundabout route toward the mountains...the road hiking was about as easy at it gets, consistently flat and smooth. We could've easily taken a more direct route toward the peak through the open desert, but hiking on the road was fast enough that the extra mileage wasn't adding much time. We saw a few saguaros that had fallen recently, probably in the recent storms, and there were a lot of yellow flowers blooming.
Around five and a half miles in, we passed the old mining camp with the remnants of a fireplace, old mattress springs, various rusty stuff, and a cylindrical water tank. Just past the end of the road, we saw the abandoned mine, fenced off and covered with criss-crossing wooden posts in what a sign described as a "bat-friendly closure" design. A lot of trailings around the mine had turquoise-colored staining on them.
We continued off-road and started the ascent toward the peak, and it got steep quickly. The brush wasn't bad, but there was enough loose rock on the slope that it slowed things down. Around 0.6 miles from the peak, TBoneKathy decided to wait while I continued. I set out for the top, and the rest of the route was similar to the early part of the climb--steep and loose in places, but there wasn't any exposure. The route followed a ridge west/southwest toward the summit, and I had to do a little scrambling over some boulders near the top to get up on top of the ridgeline with the summit.
I ended up overshooting Peak 3272 and continued to a peak slightly farther north that looked like the taller of the two. I didn't find a summit register and double checked the GPS, realizing then I'd passed the high point. I backtracked and found the register back at the real 3272, and it's in rough shape...getting the rusty lid off the metal tin was about as tough as climbing up to the peak  . There were multiple sets of pages inside, all of them badly water damaged, rust-stained, and disintegrating--bottom of the tin is turning into a mini compost pile.
I didn't look too closely at the pages much since they were crumbling in my hands, but I did see the JJ and johnlp entries from their solstice hike in December 2013--it was their route that I mostly followed today. The oldest pages I saw were from a repurposed 1994 calendar, with the first entry from 1997, although other photo sets show entries back to 1995. The most recent entry was from early December 2022. As I signed, the pen repeatedly broke the paper...definitely time for a new register up there.
[ youtube video ]
I'd already kept TboneKathy waiting a long time, so I didn't take the time to go farther north along the ridge over to the hoodoos and just took some pictures and started back down. It was slow going in places, especially near the top, but we reunited and followed the same route along the road on the hike out. We finished just late enough that there wasn't time to fit any other substantial hikes in before sunset, so we saved a few other options in the area for another day. We didn't see anyone all day, and it ended up being a fun backup plan and a nice intro to the Maricopa Mountains. |
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