Whitney

On July 8th of 1990, I made my one and only ascent of Mt. Whitney in California. Six days later, an electrical storm formed over the top of the mountain while a group took shelter in the stone hut near the summit. A bolt of lightning hit the hut and one person was killed, while 15 others were hurt by the lightning. I remember poking my head inside when I was there. Talk about timing – 6 days later and I could have been killed.

Surprise Canyon

Many years ago, I went to a remote part of the Sonoran Desert to climb a mountain. I knew it had been climbed by others before me, but I had no information on how they had approached it. It could be approached from several directions, but it would be a long walk in to get anywhere near the peak, no matter how you came at it. Here’s how I decided to do it.

I parked on the Tule Well road and headed northwest on a very faint old road out into the desert. I say faint, but I could still follow it. Obviously it had not been driven for many years, but the impressions left by vehicle tires can remain for a long time. Three and a half miles in, I crossed Smoke Tree Wash, then at five miles the faint road changed direction. Almost a right-angle bend, it abruptly turned and headed west-southwest. The desert travel so far had been incredibly flat – the old road had climbed only 40 feet in 5 miles, or about 8 feet per mile. That slope is too slight to be detected. The next 5 miles took me past several small hills and to the entrance of what the map calls Surprise Canyon. Even there, after 10 miles of travel, the old track had climbed a mere 300 feet in elevation. The Cabeza Prieta Mountains closed in around me, but the old road could actually be followed for 3 more miles where it ended at 1,500 feet elevation.

I continued north up a major canyon to a 2,600-foot saddle on the west ridge of Cabeza Benchmark. From there, it was a short walk to the summit at 2,830 feet, the highest point of the Cabeza Prieta Mountains. It was noon when I arrived, and so cold I could see my breath. I found the register and made my entry, then started back to Surprise Canyon. On the way down, I saw desert bighorn sheep nearby. An Air Force jet broke the sound barrier overhead, and its sonic boom scared the daylights out of me.

It was a very long day by the time I returned to my truck. The trip had covered a total of 25.1 miles and I was all done in. As I write this in May of 2022, even the best satellite imagery shows that the old road I followed all those years ago, very faint even then, has been reclaimed by the desert and has pretty much disappeared.

Raging Wash

Mike and I had come from a climb of a peak right on the border in the Tule Mountains. The skies were threatening rain as we drove west to the tanks at Tinajas Altas, then north several miles more. Cipriano Pass was our chosen route between the Gila Mountains and the Tinajas Altas Mountains. As we turned southwest and headed for the pass, we were in for a shock – something otherworldly greeted us. On the other side of the pass, even though it was mid-afternoon, the sky was black as night. Not just the sky, but all the way down to the floor of the Yuma Desert – pitch black. We had never seen anything like it. We needed to drive with the headlights on. Both excited and scared, we drove through the pass and found ourselves in a driving rain. The truck was already in 4WD as we turned northwest on the road that crossed the Davis Plain. The miles passed and the rain was steady. We pulled even with Vopoki Ridge and kept going.

Water was ponding on the desert floor. That’s an unusual sight, because the ground has to be saturated for the water to sit on the surface – that told us a good amount of rain had already fallen. Eventually, we came to hillier country and climbed up and away from the flat desert. We arrived at a spot where the road dipped down into a wash and crossed it. Here, a wash is what we call a creek, but only very rarely does any water flow in one. Well, today was that day.

In front of us was a raging torrent. The water was deep and wide, a chocolate-brown color with huge rollers. You could hear boulders grinding their way down the slope under the water. It was raining hard, while the lightning flashed and thunder boomed. The sight of the water roaring past was spectacular, breathtaking. We sat there in the cab of the pickup, wipers trying hopelessly to clear the rain, and watched the spectacle. If we didn’t cross here and continue along the road, we’d have to backtrack many miles to find an alternate route. I murmured something to Mike about giving it a try, and he said that if I had such a death wish, he was getting out right then and there.

Of course he was right – it would have been suicide to even attempt to drive across. The truck would have been tossed like a toy and rolled down the wash and destroyed. Anybody in it would have faced certain death from injury and drowning. To this day, I think back to when I entertained the idea of trying, even for a moment, to drive across that raging torrent – it was the height of stupidity. February 7th of 2009 was the date. We were close to Yuma, Arizona, and on that day they received an entire year’s worth of normal rainfall.

The Nines

Back in 1970, when I was living in Vancouver, I became interested in putting together an audiophile-quality stereo system. I spent every spare penny I earned on assembling the components necessary to make it happen. I won’t bore you with all the details here, but I do want to tell you about the most important part of the system. The speakers were a pair of KLH Model 9. Back then, they were considered state-of-the-art and are still considered today as perhaps as fine a speaker as has ever been made. They were a full-range electrostatic speaker, the first of their kind. I bought them from a small dealer who had a hunch that it would be worth importing a pair of them from the USA. Each of the 2 panels that made up the pair stood 6 feet tall, about 2 feet wide and were 3 inches thick. They caused quite a sensation – not only did they look like nothing else you’ve ever seen but their sound was unique. I had the only pair in the city. Word got around, and one day a reporter from one of the daily newspapers came to my humble abode to listen to them and write a story about them.

As I recall, I paid about $1,500.00 for them, a small fortune in those days. I see that KLH has started manufacturing them again, and a pair sells for $12,500.00 US. I had mine until early 1979, but I was about to move a long distance and couldn’t take them with me. A fellow from Bellingham responded to my ad and drove up and got them for a bargain price.

Uneasy

It was an early October morning in the Sonoran Desert. The weather had remained hot, with highs touching a hundred each day. Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument had recently re-opened its back country and I had been spending days scouring some of the more remote areas to pick up some peaks I’d missed in earlier years. Today found me in the Quitobaquito Hills.

I had parked at dawn at Cipriano Pass, (a different pass than the one of the same name mentioned earlier in “Raging Wash”) then headed out on foot to the west. Passing through some rough country brought me to the foot of Peak 1844, which I climbed by its northeast slope. At sunrise I stood on its summit and saw just how close to the Mexican border I was – it was a straight shot across open desert only 2.5 miles away. That meant one thing – it would be only an hour’s walk for drug cartel thugs and the undocumented to get this far into the US.

When I dropped back down to the foot of the mountain, I thought I’d use the cover of a narrow canyon for a mile to get me close in to my next peak. It was sinuous and tight, but afforded good cover from the surrounding hills. Unfortunately, Mexicans had come to the same conclusion. Their cast-offs were plain to see – a ruined sneaker, the ubiquitous black plastic water jugs, a piece of clothing. The canyon was so narrow that at times vegetation covered it over and created a dimly-lit tunnel to pass through. Those were the spots that worried me the most, as they were perfect places for Bad Guys to hole up during the day to avoid the burning sun. They would wait for the cover of night to move on.

That was a paranoid mile, and as soon as it made sense, I climbed steeply out of it and started across a tumbled countryside. In a short while, I started up the southeastern spur of Peak 1633 and before long stood atop it. It was like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire – the summit ridge was littered with gear left by cartel thralls. It was tucked under trees, stashed behind rocks and pretty much everywhere. Spots like that always make me nervous because you never know who might be lurking nearby. Some of the Bad Guys are armed and mean business. I hurriedly left a register, with little hope it’d be there for long.

I headed directly northeast down from the summit and across the open desert to finally reach the old Cipriano Well, dry these many years. From there, it was a mile plus to climb back up to the pass where my truck waited. It had been an exciting few hours.

Aguajita Wash

Here in the desert, at least in my part of it, we call a creek a wash. And as you know, our washes don’t have any water running in them 99% of the time. Some of these washes have names, most don’t, and who’s to decide which ones are worthy of a name? For instance, how about Aguajita Wash? We find it in the harshest of landscapes, near the Mexican border about 125 miles west of Tucson. The name implies a diminutive form of agua, which means water, so perhaps a small creek.

Our wash comes to life on the north side of the Puerto Blanco Mountains, not far from Dripping Springs, and heads west for a few miles. It then describes a large arc to the southwest, passing the Cipriano Hills in the process. We pass by the old Golden Bell Mine, then Bonita Well. Our wash now forms the western edge of La Abra Plain and is making a bee-line for the Quitobaquito Hills, but before it reaches them it turns due south. The border is crossed within a mile of Quitobaquito Springs, a perennial water supply in this parched land, and then, without any fanfare, our wash continues into Mexico. There, about 2 KM later, it disappears into the (dry) Río Sonora. The entire run of our wash is just over 16 miles, and I’ll bet you that almost none of the tourists who drive along it in the park even know it has a name. If you click on the link below, it will open a map. Zoom in with the +/- sign in the upper left corner and you’ll see the name, then you can follow it upstream to the right or downstream to the left. Have fun.

https://listsofjohn.com/qmap?lat=32.0383&lon=-112.9397&z=12&t=c&P=300&M=Desert+Mountaineer