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| Hiking | 9.70 Miles |
4,228 AEG |
| | Hiking | 9.70 Miles | 14 Hrs 57 Mns | | 0.78 mph |
| 4,228 ft AEG | 2 Hrs 30 Mns Break | | | |
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| no partners | | **Warning: Be prepared!! This was a very difficult hike because the trail is VERY overgrown and hard to find in many places! Sometimes there are huge trees right in the middle of the old trail. Brian and I got off the trail, unintentionally I may add, probably 30 or 40 times throughout the day. We started the hike at 8:20 am and didn't get back to our vehicle until 11:15 pm. Yes, we did take a lunch, breaks, and even did some trail maintenance. We believe that if we didn't do any trail maintenance at all, we may have finished an hour earlier. We greatly under-estimated the time it took to do this hike. It was extra slow at night when we had to rely on headlamps trying to find pieces of overgrown trail.
From where we parked, Brian and I walked 0.75 miles up the road. Once at the trail junction, we turned right and followed a cairned trail. In the beginning part of the trail, we commented that it was in better shape than we imagined, but higher up there was a lot of confusion and we even got off trail for 30 minutes and eventually had to do a terrible bushwhack to get back to where the trail was. In the first half mile we saw a lot of buffelgrass but we were able to find cairns and the route finding wasn't too bad. In the first half of the hike we found a few places with catclaw bush growing into the trail. We especially hate this kind of bush because it sticks to you, it can cut you and even if you use branch cutters and try to trim it you can get your hands and arms cut in the process. We took pride in being able to heavily trim a lot of catclaw bush that interfered with the trail. I probably trimmed 10 catclaw bushes, along with many ocotillo stalks, and cholla that came too close to the trail. We seemed to be making good time in the lower 1.5 mile of trail. After a while we decided not to do anymore trimming because we were concerned about trying to finish the time before sunset, which was our goal. We got off the trail and few times and lost some time in route finding. After hiking a total of 1.25 miles of trail (2 miles overall), we reached a saddle and saw a barbed wire fence. Brian went a little further to the South and saw evidence of an old mine. We decided to take a short break here. It was already 10:40 AM and we were shocked that we only had half the elevation done and had another 1,800 feet of elevation to go on very overgrown trail.
We finally got to the big saddle around 12:50 pm. Then, looking West, we thought we were able to see the peak, but unfortunately, we realized the peak was behind it and out of sight and that we had another 900 feet of elevation gain to do. We kept moving and decided to have our lunch around 1:30 pm before reaching the summit. We took about 30 minutes and then started climbing up where we thought the trail went. We didn't see any defined trails or cairns in this area. We ended up winging it and just going the way it looked best without consulting the GPS. We felt that we were burning too much time trying to figure out where other hikers had gone. Our conclusion was there are many ways to go up in this area and that the original trail was completely blown out, eroded, destroyed. etc. Brian read an old story on the history of this trail. We don't know when it was built, but apparently it was made for horseback riders and somehow someone was able to ride a horse to the top, which is very hard to believe based on the hellish route that we experienced, especially in the last mile or so.
If you look at our route, there is a considerable different on the up and down routes. I would say our down route was better than the up route, but neither route was great, as we got off trail many times. On the way down, I would say that we didn't get too far off trail, so if you had to follow a route, our down route would be slightly better.
The last 1/4 mile or more was full of dead and live trees that we had to weave our way through and sometimes break branches to get through. There were pieces of trail here but it was so overgrown.
We finally got to the summit around 3:40 pm and were a bit shocked at how long it took us! We found an old ammo box with a registry. The earliest entries were from 1998 and the entry before us was from April 2024. There was a little wind at the summit and it was getting later in the day so we only stayed at the summit for 15 minutes, had a drink and were in shock it took us so long to get there. We got our photos and took off. I had already finished 60% of a gallon of water up to this point and knew I would be easily finishing a gallon of water by the time I got to my truck. Keep in mind this is in December!! I would not recommend doing this hike in warm weather!
We made it back to the big saddle by about 6 pm and it was starting to get dark already. We took a break there, then put our head lamps on so we could see better. But, of course, walking at night is always slower than daytime, even with the lamps on. At least by this time we had some of the steeper trail-less boulder sections out of the way. In theory, we only needed to follow the trail down from there. Even doing that was difficult because we lost the trail several times. You really need to look for faint switchbacks because if you don't look for them you are guaranteed to be off-trail and you won't know it until you've walked 50 feet past the switchback! We kept moving, taking just short 5 minute breaks for water.
I finished all of my water by the time we got to the old road junction heading North. From here we still had 0.75 miles of road but it was faster moving and easy to see. Luckily, I had 16 oz of water in my truck and guzzled most of it when I got there. Brian and I both believed this was the 2nd hardest hike we ever did in terms of physical effort. Probably only Mt Whitney (14,505) was harder because it was 18 miles of hiking via the mountaineer's route and we were on our feet for 16 hours or more. Our elapsed time on this hike was nearly 15 hours, however, we did take lunch and several breaks along the way, and did some trail maintenance.
"Hardest hike of the year, for MOST years past, and most likely for the next several years!!"
Stats:
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Distance (round trip): 9.7 miles
AEG: 4,228 feet
Strava moving time: 6 hrs 37 mins
Strava elapsed time: 14 hrs 57 mins |
| _____________________
Michael Williams
IT Professional
Rocky Point Vacation Rentals
Ocean Front Condo in Rocky Point, Sonora, Mexico
www.beachfrontmexico.us
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I'd probably give it a couple years before I do it again tho
](https://hikearizona.com/dex2/images/smilies/eusa_wall.gif "Brick wall"){kind=small}
I put my dirty socks in the back to throw off the dogs. 
Turned out to be a fun day with a great group. It was good to meet Scott, get a real hike with Amy, and to hike with everybody else again too.
