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| Hiking | 4.91 Miles |
2,409 AEG |
| | Hiking | 4.91 Miles | 5 Hrs 24 Mns | | 1.04 mph |
| 2,409 ft AEG | 40 Mns Break | | | |
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| no partners | | I was heading back to Phoenix from Las Vegas, and decided to go about an hour south into California and hike up to Clark Mountain. Clark Mountain has an elevation of 7,930 feet and prominence of 4,232 feet; it is in the Mojave National Preserve. It is also on the Sierra Club Desert Peaks Section(DPS) list of peaks.
I drove in about 5 miles on some dirt roads to get to the TH at Clark Mountain Camp, which is on BLM land. You'd need 4WD to go the last 0.2 miles to the TH; prior to that I imagine that an AWD SUV could make the drive. The road goes through private property, but public access is allowed as long as you stay on the Clark Mountain Road.
The hike isn't all that long, but it is steep, slippery, and there is no trail. I gained 900 of elevation in the first 0.6 miles -- so much for a warm-up!
There was no bushwhacking per se, but there were quite a number of juniper trees, pinyon pine trees, and agavaceae to zig-zag around.
My route went west at first up and beyond a couple of subpeaks; from there I went on a south ridgeline to the summit. I did not encounter anything worse than easy-to-mild class 2 along the way.
While going on the south ridgeline to the summit, I sometimes stayed right on the ridgeline, but more often than not I was either just to the left or just to the right of the ridgeline. There were some steep drop-offs in a few places, but there was nothing sketchy.
There were some route finding challenges on this hike and I was glad to have a GPS track. There were a few cairns in places, but fpr the most part there weren't enough of them to serve as a guide. For much of the hike there were so many trees that I couldn't see far enough ahead of me to see what route to take, so I stopped a lot to take a look at a GPS track.
There were great views on top and I enjoyed the hike, although it was more difficult than I thought that it would be. In other words, this is a fairly typical DPS peak. |
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| Civilization is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there |
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