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| Hiking | 4.20 Miles |
1,275 AEG |
| | Hiking | 4.20 Miles | 3 Hrs 30 Mns | | 1.20 mph |
| 1,275 ft AEG | | | | |
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| no partners | | The drive took up a large portion of the day which limited our daylight time. Brian, Tim, and I left Tucson around 7:30 am and started hiking Ash peak a little after 10 am. From the dirt road going South from AZ 70 we drove roughly 1/2 mile down a pretty good road. There were only 2 rough spots that were like small wash crossings but this was still possible using our 2 wheel drive Ford F-350 high clearance van.
Thanks to Matthias Stender who posted a route which we used as a guideline and proved to be helpful. From our starting point, we could only see part of the terrain and if we didn't have a route, we may have tried to hike through a gap in the rocky ridgeline straight up, which would have been much harder than the hike we did.
From the parking area do an open country hike S/SW for 0.4 miles. You will approach a wash up ahead. Cross it and get on the other side. From here we found some cattle trails which we followed West for about 1/4 mile. There were some amazing patches of poppies here. The object is to get around the rocky cliffs above. Once we got around the rock, the ridgeline was pretty clear and we started going up. Up ahead the ridge got pretty rocky so we stayed to the right, and aimed for another low saddle on the way to the peak. We could see a gap between the large rock formation along the ridge and the peak itself. That's the place we wanted to get to next. After getting closer, we did the steep open country hike up and through a gap near the rock ridgeline, then we turned right and found a smooth ridgeline heading right up to the summit. We found some interesting rocks in this area that had many small embedded spherical shaped rocks in them. We stopped and took a water break in this area and looked at some of the rocks. We could see that near the summit it got quite steep and getting to the top involved a short class 3 section but it may have been possible to avoid this by going around.
At the peak we found a registry in a rock pile on the South end and also saw 2 US survey markers.
Throughout the entire hike we saw many interesting flowers including poppies, winding mariposa lilies (white), desert dandelion, shaggy fleabane, purple/blue sandwort, wild onion, Dakota mock vervain (or perhaps verbena), wavy-leaf paintbrush, long leaf Indian paintbrush, plains blackfoot (looked something like a daisy), hedgehog cactus, Rose's claret-cup cactus, Eaton's penstemon or firecracker penstemon (red), etc.
We went back roughly the same way we took up and did that slightly faster.
Stats:
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Distance (round trip) = 4.17 miles
AEG = 1,276 feet
Strava moving time = 2 hours 16 minutes
Strava elapsed time = 4 hours 26 minutes |
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Wildflowers Observation Substantial
poppies, winding mariposa lilies (white), desert dandelion, shaggy fleabane, purple/blue sandwort, wild onion, Dakota mock vervain (or perhaps verbena), wavy-leaf paintbrush, long leaf Indian paintbrush, plains blackfoot (looked something like a daisy), hedgehog cactus, Rose's claret-cup cactus, Eaton's penstemon or firecracker penstemon (red) |
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| _____________________
Michael Williams
IT Professional
Rocky Point Vacation Rentals
Ocean Front Condo in Rocky Point, Sonora, Mexico
www.beachfrontmexico.us
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