Palo Verde Peak In Palo Verde Mountains Wilderness
- Updated: December 12, 2016
- Post By: Matthew Hengst
December 12, 2016
Palo Verde Peak (1,375')
[Pics] [Map]
We already hit our main objective for the area yesterday when we did Thumb Peak and Paint Mountain / Wiley BM. Looking around for other interesting peaks in the area Palo Verde Peak stood out as being more prominent than most of the bumps out there. And as it turned out it's a pretty interesting peak.
We spent the night where we'd parked to do Thumb Peak and in the morning continued south.
We turned off Wiley's Well and went north on Old Palo Verde Rd. The latter was passable in the Subaru though I had to really gun it a few times when the gravel got deep.
We had a track from Daryn Dodge though it was a bit of a challenge to get off the road where we wanted to park and I may have scraped the Subaru a bit jumping over a burm.
This was the drainage Daryn and co went up.
We had to climb up the side almost immediatly to avoid some rocks and then just followed the drainage toward the peak until it started to climb.
The slope was steep and the best workout of the weekend.
When we reached the ridge we turned left and started up some more solid rock
There was some light 3rd class when we had to drop down into a notch before the summit.
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| Summit of Palo Verde Peak |
The last part of the ridge had one slightly exposed section you have to walk across.
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| Summit of Palo Verde Peak |
We enjoyed the view and discussed going down the eastern slope which Bob Burd had done when he climbed this peak from the 78. From what I could see the route down the eastern side might be easier though the difficulty of getting back around to our car was enough to settle us on just backtracking.
Once we reached the bottom of the slope we took the next drainage to the south of the one we'd come up. This actually proved to be a better route than the one we'd taken up and soon we were back at the car.
I was looking for another peak to do before we headed home and Peak 1534T on the opposite side of the road looked tempting. After some discussion we decided we didn't have enough time (or as it turned out enough food) for today and left it for another time.
Sometime in the future I want to go back and try approaching from the norther wash that meets the road around Fort Glass BM.
We decided to head for home and took a chance by continuing north on Old Palo Verde Road. Fortunately the northern section was easier than the part we'd driven already and this saved us quite a bit of time.
We stopped to eat in Blythe at Garcia's Restaurant which was excellent and made it back to Orange County early enough to buy a christmas tree and get all the gear sorted at the house.
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