Please be sure to read Part 1 of this story before you start this one, to get the most from it.

Day 5

So far, all of the climbing I’d done during my one-week vacation from school was legit. Well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration – 3 climbs had been legit, and 6 had been stealths. It was high time to start living dangerously, time to do some even stealthier climbing, my favorite pastime. I was up and moving about at 4:30 AM, and driving a few minutes later. Something I haven’t told you is that I had brought my mountain bike with me on this trip, and I planned to use it. I parked in a discrete spot, unloaded the bike in the dark, lifted it over a fence, crossed a road, trundled the bike down into a deep wash and through some brush to emerge on a military road some distance later.

The faintest bit of a dawn was forming in the east, and I pedaled like a man possessed. With my headlamp blazing, I made really good time, and close to 3 miles later I left the road and headed off across the untrammeled desert. By now it was broad daylight, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could pedal across the open desert with little effort. There was my peak, straight ahead.

Ditching my bike where I could ride no more, I scrambled up the loose slope and stood on the summit of my peak half an hour later. There was no register, so I left one. Here’s the view I had from the summit as sunrise crept across the desert below.

I slipped and slid my way back down to the bike and rode away. Three hours after leaving the truck, I had reached it once again – good thing, too, as it was getting hot. It had taken a total of 9 miles to pull off this little stealth. Once the bike was back in the truck, I wasted no time getting off military land and making tracks out of there.

I stopped in the town of Gila Bend, at Mickey D’s, and enjoyed fries and a huge icy drink in their air conditioning while pondering my next move. Decisions made, I headed west on the freeway for 24 miles and parked on the north shoulder. The peak I wanted to bag was only an easy mile away, but the day was hot and I knew it’d be an unpleasant stroll.

Half an hour later, I stood on top of Sentinel Peak amidst a cloud of flying ants, then beat a hasty retreat.

Back at my vehicle, I made my way east and took an exit that would lead me deep into the desert. Once I started out, it took a lot of navigating with map and GPS – I had traveled many miles on rough dirt roads when I saw this strange sight. You might be wondering, why are eleven bikes sitting together many miles away from the nearest human settlement? Well, in my world, where Bad Guys smuggle drugs and people into the country, they sometimes use bicycles to do the job. Eleven idiots riding bikes are pretty easy for the Border Patrol to spot – they might trigger sensors that register movement or vibration, or be spotted from the air by day or night. Once arrested, the bikes are, of course, simply left where the arrests occurred. So no, this was not the site of a poorly-attended bicycle auction.

I’m not going to give too many specifics here, as this was the start of an exciting stealth. Suffice it to say that I had to do a lot of exploratory work to chase down a series of roads – the farther I went, the worser they were, until the worstest of them all brought me to my destination. There I was at the edge of prohibitos autem terra, exactly where I wanted to be.

I set up my chair in the shade of my truck and relaxed in the heat, then later cooked my usual camping meal of pasta. Damn, it was hot! Surprisingly, I was able to make a cell phone call home, assuring my wife that the stealth I was about to commit would turn out fine. I watched the sun set on a successful day, one with a small stealth under my belt and a much bigger one to come.

Day 6

The big day had finally arrived – I’d waited months, and now the fun was about to begin. When you’re planning to do a stealth climb, you want to play your cards close to your chest – the exact nature of this tightly-held secret was one I hadn’t even shared with my wife. After a restless night, I awoke before dawn, choked down some oatmeal and took one last look around. My mountain bike was prepared, my pack was loaded with 4 quarts and I was set to go. With just enough light to see, I rode away from my truck.

I had all the maps I needed, and the GPS would make sure I always knew precisely where I was. The first mile was a bit rough, but then things got easier. I made good time for the next 5, but it took a while, even on the military road I traveled. Out in the open as I was, I’d stop and check my surroundings often – when it’s so quiet, usually you can hear something coming, whether vehicle or aircraft, long before you can see it. With 6 miles under my belt, I then made a major change of direction – I had covered all the intervening ground, now I made a beeline for my peak. The sun rose on this last stretch.

When a mile from the peak, I had this good look at it. The highest point is on the left side, on the flat area.

Another mile put me at its base. The chance of anyone finding me now was less than zero, so I simply dropped the bike out in the open.

The climb would be the simplest imaginable, nothing complicated – it was just that it was so bloody far away from anything, I knew no climbers had been there before. Yes, it was remote, but being way out in the middle of a bombing range had put it off any and all climbers’ radar. This was the type of climb I lived for, a pure adrenaline rush. The climb itself only covered a quarter of a mile, but I was on edge the entire time. The summit was quite flat. I know that this picture looks like I’m not even on a mountain top, but I am, a couple hundred feet above the desert floor.

There was a benchmark up there somewhere, left by surveyors way back in the 1940s. It took a lot of looking to find it, but eventually I did, buried under a pile of rocks. Protected from the elements all those 70 years, it was in beautiful shape. Sorry, I can’t show it to you here as its name would give away the location. There were a few scraps of wood and wire from the original survey, but that was all that showed anyone had ever been there – even the military hadn’t bothered the place. I spent a while and enjoyed the solitude, maybe a bit too long as you’ll see later. This place offered tremendous views of a mountain range in which a friend and I would climb a couple of months later – a lot of telephoto shots helped me line things up for that trip.  I hated to leave, it was so quiet and still, but I had to – there were 9 miles of very off-limits military reservation that I needed to cross before I’d be back at the safety of my truck.

My register safely buried under a pile of rocks (it was anonymous), a quick 15 minutes put me back at my bike. There, just as I was about to hop on and ride away, something caught my eye. A snake, very small and coiled up – so small, in fact, that from one side of the coil to the other, it wasn’t more than 3 inches across.

As I took a closer look, there seemed to be something odd about this little guy – he didn’t move as I approached him. Usually a rattlesnake will move his head to follow you as you walk around, but this one didn’t. Even a baby rattler can bite you with enough venom to kill you, so I was cautious. I found a stick and prodded him with it, uncoiling him a bit.

He didn’t hiss, but he did stick his tongue out a few times – he wasn’t dead, but seemed awfully lethargic. It couldn’t have been from the cold, because it was anything but cold on this warm October morning. It turns out that this was a baby sidewinder rattlesnake. I left him in peace and hopped on my bike. It was an easy mile back to my military road.

Between lollygagging on the summit taking photos, and then with the snake, I had wasted a lot of time, time that I should have spent getting back out of there. Once I reached the road, I started pedaling as fast as I could, trying to eat up the miles. The morning was still crystal-clear but getting noticeably hotter. The only sound was the spinning of my wheels on the ground and my heavy breathing. From time to time, I would stop and then listen carefully for any other sounds, while looking all around for anything untoward. The stops were every 5 minutes or so, but it turns out that wasn’t often enough.

While I was pedaling, it was important to keep my eyes on the ground ahead of me so as not to have an accident. That’s exactly what I was doing when I happened to look up one time to check ahead (it had been a few minutes since I last looked) and — oh my God, there was a truck coming straight towards me!! The jig was up – I’d been discovered.

Please stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of this story.