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| no partners | | We arrived in King Valley Tuesday morning via McPherson Pass in the Castle Dome Mountains. Soaking in the beautiful, sunny & warm January day as we drove the dusty roads north across the wide open valley. The KOFA Range spread out in front of us, covering the horizon. What a rugged range. Some of the most austere and difficult terrain in Arizona. A huge bookend to the southwest, KOFA Bute looms over the valley floor below. How can something that imposing not be on your bucket list?
I spent Tuesday afternoon doing recon, making it to within a hundred vertical feet of the edge of the top. It looked to me like one might start from the end of the road and work directly up a series of ledges and ramps all the way up to the base of the final rampart. Siege-style. Epic fail. The ledges and ramps proved sketchy and steep and the cliffs were a hundred feet of dead verticality. Nice to explore, but I'm soooooo glad I didn't have Nancy and the dogs. This is why one does recon.
Every intersection in The KOFA is numbered. What a brilliant idea! Our approach road is the road that heads Northeast from intersection number 21. Wednesday morning we set out to do a light recon walk. Thus we only brought 1.5 liters of water. 6 liters would've been about right. Also, this is a tough hike for dogs. Our young guy, Pico did fine, but I ended up carrying our 10 year old boxer mix through much of the steeper and cholla infested sections. Typical for us. A stroll ends up in a summit push.
We took the wash that angles to the right from the end of the road. It snakes it's way through the most ghoulish and gnarly rock formations for perhaps twenty minutes of easy walking. Look for our cairn on the right at a side wash. The entire route is sparsely cairned but the cairns are big. KOFA Bute will now be more or less south of you and the remainder of the hike takes you up to a series of ridges that run up the northeast corner of the formation to the one weak spot in the upper cliffs. This "weak spot" is on the eastern edge of the bute where the rampart has tumbled enough to allow class 2 access to the top. Basically, the hike takes you around the formation clockwise along the north and then northeast flanks for about 180 degrees on the compass.
From where the small wash leaves the main wash you should likely be able to see where it breaks through a 30 foot headwall. The idea is to leave the main wash and hike up the small wash through this break and continue up to a ridge on the northeast slope, then work your way up and across several ridges trending southeast until you see one ridge that leads up the slope past a small (15 foot) ledge. You will easily pass this small ledge on the right end. This will deposit you on the talus just below the the final tumbled cliff band. You are now looking up at the tumbled cliffs along the top of the mesa. Work your way left cross-hilling, staying low until you can see the first broad and open access point through the tumbled cliffs above you. "Top" is relative. Once on top of the mesa, you'll see the summit about a half mile away to the south. From here you simply beeline to the easy valley between the two prominences. As you reach the saddle at the top of the sloping valley you'll get a drop-away view of the entire King Valley. The actual summit well be the one on your left. Big cairn, 360.
Our return went much smoother although we were pretty dehydrated having given the dogs most of our water. |
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