Roadside Attraction
Monday, April 21st, 2025: Black Hills, Hikes, Southeast Arizona.
It’s a remote two-lane blacktop through vast, lonely, dry ranchlands punctuated by stark buttes and small mountain ranges. Most who drive it are commuting to or from the giant mine, isolated on another road that branches off north. Preoccupied with concerns of job and family, with little thought to the barren country they routinely race past.
For humans, this dry country is defined by the river that allows farming on its occasionally broad floodplains. But to shortcut a bend in the river, the highway rises onto a plateau, and near the eastern end of this plateau, the road passes below a distinctive peak surrounded by sheer bastions of rimrock. That peak had always beckoned me, but until now it seemed too short a hike to justify the hour-and-a-half drive.
From the highway, the rimrock looks unclimbable, so I researched it online. As I look for more obscure hiking areas, what I’m finding is that my only predecessors in these overlooked places are the “peakbaggers” – the geeky, competitive subculture that cares more about numbers and life lists than nature, beauty, or even athletic challenge. The number that matters to peakbaggers is topographical prominence: the height of a peak relative to the lowest contour line that completely encircles it. The goal of a peakbagger is to climb the most peaks with the most prominence, verify their ascents, and share them with their community for bragging rights.
The vast majority of peaks don’t have trails to the top, so unlike regular hikers, peakbaggers spend most of their time bushwhacking rather than following trails. But since prominence is their goal rather than elevation or distance, peakbaggers typically avoid wilderness areas within sprawling mountain ranges, where tall peaks are connected by tall ridges, drastically reducing their prominence. So a broad distinction between hikers and peakbaggers is that the former use trails to hike or backpack long distances across varied terrain, while the latter drive to the base of an isolated peak, race up it, log a GPS coordinate, and race back down.
My recent experience reinforces this distinction. Hikers are simply not discovering many of the places I’m hiking these days, because they’re not maintained or known as hiking areas. They lack trail networks. The only people who are hiking them are the peakbaggers.
In this case, their GPS tracks had shown me the route around that sheer rimrock.
Despite being right off the paved highway, this is such an overlooked area that the maps don’t even show the high-clearance 4wd track that accesses the route. It climbs up a shallow outlying ridge and dead-ends at a hilltop clearing. A short distance above I could see a fence traversing the slope toward a ravine that divided me from the rimrock peak, and I started by following that fenceline toward the ravine.
Another clear day, with less wind, and mild temps. Lots of cattle sign, but nothing recent. I love this habitat along the state border, combining species and genera familiar from the Mojave, with Sonoran plants like ocotillo and honey mesquite. And the rocks here have a subtle variety and beauty it’s easy to miss while driving past. In fact, the entire landscape becomes more beautiful the more you focus on the subtle contrasts.
The head of the ravine is a small basin on the back side of the mountain, where minor draws converge from the rimrock above. My route would ascend a hump between two of these draws, punctuated by rock formations that mostly hid the peak I was aiming for.
Like most of our volcanic terrain, it was slow walking, picking my way between sharp rocks, cacti, and yucca, but it wasn’t annoyingly slow, and the weather was perfect. At the head of the hump, I emerged onto a small ledge, and beyond that, the real climb began – up and across the steep slope below the rimrock, toward what I assumed would be a gap through which I could reach the actual peak.
I’d been sick the whole night before with what I’d assumed was food poisoning. I’d felt better in the morning but still wasn’t sure I was up to this climb. I was ready to give up at any point, but I took it slow, and as I rounded the slope, it gradually became clear that the rimrock ended in a sort of cove between here and the peak. The peak itself rose out of the end of the ridge formed by the rimrock.
The gap in the rimrock turned out to be a narrow ramp, and at the top I emerged onto a narrow, juniper-dotted mesa, with the peak at its far end.
The peak, only a couple hundred feet above this mesa, is guarded by bare rock walls, but I could now see what appeared to be a climbable gap. The final slope was the steepest I’d faced yet, but it was lined with cool, spherical rock nodules or concretions, and climbing straight up, before I knew it I had reached the gap and was levering myself over the final boulders to the very top.
This was a real 360 degree peak – not like one of those rounded, forested mountaintops that dominate our larger ranges. The top, an irregular platform of blocky boulders, was roughly 25 by 50 feet, with two separate federal benchmarks, and a sheer drop on all sides except the gap I’d climbed through.
From up there, I really fell in love with the subtle patterns on the landscape: landforms, rock outcrops, bedrock transitions, and vegetation. Impossible to convey in a photograph. I wanted to stay for hours just soaking it all in. But I was trying to regain muscle mass, I’d done three full workouts during the week, and if I left now, my lunch would still be 3 hours late.
My knee must be improving, because despite the steepness I made it back down to the mesa quickly and safely. From there it would be a piece of cake. And not a single cow or bull, as far as the eye could see. This was quickly becoming my favorite short hike in our area!
As usual, on the way back I was paying more attention to the details. The lichen here is fantastic, and the ocotillos more than made up for the early-season lack of wildflowers.
Following the ravine and fenceline back to my vehicle, I took a shortcut that led me across a slope of dense, sharp volcanic cobbles – just enough to keep it from being a walk in the park.
I’d planned this trip assuming I would get a hearty lunch at the cafe in the Mormon farming village on the edge of the floodplain – but it was closed for Easter!
And when I finally got home in late afternoon, and warmed up a batch of leftover Mexican food, I discovered it wasn’t food poisoning after all – I had a case of stomach flu, and would start the week sick, unable to eat, so weak I could barely stand. Gotta take the bad with the good…
