Indian Peak 2017

Five people showed up for my Memorial Day 2017 trip to Indian Peak, although one of them only stayed for Sunday night (!). Thanks to Jerry, Stanley, Mike, John and Grant for the company.

We had quite the itinerary:

• Friday morning, Jerry, Stanley and I checked out the "lace curtain" on the north side of Pahvant Butte. This is a tafoni formation caused by chemical alteration of the volcanic material by Lake Bonneville. It is indescribably strange.

• Next, we spent some time hunting for obsidian at Black Spring. There is a vast amount of obsidian here, mostly black but also brown and striped and snowflake. Stanley has an amazing eye for picking out the best pieces on the ground.

• The three of us arrived at the Sawtooth Peak campsite at around 4:30. Miraculously, Mike and John found us an hour or so later, in spite of my very complicated driving directions.

• On Saturday morning, the five of us piled into two vehicles and headed for Indian Peak. I had previously summited Indian Peak from the southeast, and that route had a fair amount of mahogany to thrash through. This time, I decided to attack the peak from the northwest. It turns out that there is a fine bladed road that runs up to the Indian Peak ridgeline from a chained area where the Ryan Spring county road crosses Greens Canyon on the Hamlin Valley side. We saw several wild horse herds on the drive -- the horses are handsome and healthy looking.

  The hike to the summit had a moderate amount of bushwhacking, and we had to navigate through occasional fields of talus and lichen-stained crags. We found that the best route was generally on the north side of the crags; the south side had mahogany scrub and cliffs. The slope got steeper near the top, and we were happy to reach the main ridge just north of the summit. There were still patches of snow here and there. The view at the top is (still) incredible.

• In spite of the bushwhacking, the hike didn't really take all that long. We spent the rest of the afternoon driving around the area, looking at the sights. We found vast areas of chained landscape; a sign informed us that the BLM, the state and the National Mustang Association collaborated on chaining over 1,000 acres in 1989, seeding it with exotic grasses for the sake of wild horses (and more importantly, domestic cattle). There isn't much grass there now — just sand and sagebrush.

  We checked out the cabin at Lopers Spring at the southern end of the Mountain Home Range, and got to see the cliffs that surround the high point. (On my last trip to the area, we found a route through a break in the cliffs to the top.) We drove up the southern end of the Needles Road, but we didn't see anything resembling needles, so we turned around. The road is blocked off at Vance Spring and a very tall fence surrounds the area, so we were forced to drive the bumpy perimeter track to get back to the county-maintained road.

• On Sunday, I had an ambitious plan to hike to the second highest peak in the Indian Peak Range. It's an unnamed summit, 9576 ft tall, located in high country south and east of Indian Peak. We drove out to Cottonwood Creek, and I was pleased to see that the road had been recently bladed. My idea was to hike up an old road into a canyon north of the summit, find horse trails to the ridgeline, then follow the ridge to the summit.

  The trouble started when Jerry's hydration pack suddenly leaked all of its water into Jerry's day pack. I then realized that we'd parked on the wrong side road, forcing us to go cross-country to look for the right one. We did find horse trails in the brush, but they were inconsistent, forcing us to stop frequently and hunt for a better bushwhacking line. At this point, Jerry had enough and went back to the vehicles.

  But it wasn't too long before we found a wild horse superhighway and popped out of the brush near a cornice just below the ridge. We took a break there, and I noticed a red object in the rocks near the pass. This turned out to be a Folgers coffee container holding a geocache — we had found it without using a GPS!

  We followed horse trails south around the east side of the next bump on the ridgeline, which proved to be a really bad idea when they petered out in thick mountain mahogany, cliffs and talus. We struggled back up to the ridge and got a view of the next knob, which was well-protected with cliffs on both sides. After a lunch break, we decided to see whether we could get around or over the bump by heading up a debris- and talus- filled couloir on the west side. This worked surprisingly well, and soon we were in a pretty meadow at the next saddle.

  The next couple of bumps were easy to pass. Maybe too easy — John and Mike zoomed off ahead on a horse trail across the slopes, while Stanley and I labored up higher trails that stayed just below the summits. Eventually Stanley and I came out on the high point, and we were surprised to see John and Mike on the next knob to the south. We tried to convince them with hand signals that we were on the higher bump, and they came over to confirm it. The register was in a glass jar in a small red-painted coffee can, and it had been placed there by the Desert Peaks chapter of the Sierra Club in 2005. We were now the fourth party to sign in (!).

  Rather than heading back the way that we had come, we decided to make a loop by dropping east down the drainage between Peak 9576 and Twin Peak and returning to the cars via the Cottonwood Creek road. We stayed on the north facing slope of the draw, so that we only had to contend with deadfall rather than mahogany (on south facing slopes) or wild rose thickets (along the stream). That worked well, and when we got lower down, John spotted the start of a series of very fine wild horse trails that took us directly to the road, in the saddle between Cottonwood Creek and Sheep Creek. From there it was just a couple of miles down the road to the cars, passing by a charming old cabin.

• I joked on the way back to camp that the probability of Grant finding us was about the same as the sun exploding. To everyone's surprise, he was waiting for us when we got there. It was his birthday, and we had a happier happy hour than I'd expected.

• On Monday morning, all of us except Grant hiked up the Elephant's Back. (Grant had already checked it out on Sunday.) We tackled the second highest peak, and while everyone thought it was really nice, we weren't sufficiently motivated to ascend the high point a mile or so away. (I had been up both summits on a previous trip. Like the lace curtain, this area is hard to describe and it's pretty cool. It really does look like elephant hide. Check out the photos.)

• We stopped at ghost town of Frisco on our way back to Milford. The cemetery was decorated with flowers for Memorial Day, and not all of them were plastic. Many of the remaining grave markers are for babies who passed away in the harsh environment, and some of them have been touchingly restored. I think it may be the best ghost town cemetery I've visited.

• After a break at Milford, we headed out to the geothermal area at Negro Mag Wash, in the northwestern foothills of the Mineral Mountains. We passed the Blundell geothermal energy plant, whose shiny metal pipes criss-cross the landscape like a surreal art project. I had expected to get to the old Roosevelt Hot Springs site, but I misread my own directions and took us to the site of Negro Mag's brothel and hot-springs sanitarium. The only evidence of the sanitarium that remains is a group of pits in the soil, just below the now-revitalized thermal area. There are fumaroles and boiling springs right along the wash bottom. There are also many dead trees, which appear to have been killed by the new thermal activity.

  A surprise: it turns out that Negro Mag Wash is an obsidian source, and we (mostly Stanley!) found gorgeous pieces of obsidian on the slopes and in the wash. There were lots of transparent and striped pieces, and some really fine snowflake pieces. I no longer bring rocks home (I had an intervention!), but it sure was tempting.

go to the Indian Peak gallery