They call it "Old Geezers Mountain" or Flat Top. I can assure you that the ones who have climbed this mountain may be old geezers now but they weren't when they climbed this rock... I've climbed many 6000' peaks and this one at 3100' tops them all. There's no trail, it's a scramble over boulders, up narrow, steep arroyos. And the final ascent is almost straight up. The view from the top is spectacular, unfortunatly it wasn't very clear the day I climbed this monster so the pictures don't do it justice. About 1/3 of the way up I encountered a javolina but couldn't get the camera out in time to photograph him. He was approching me from upwind so he walked within 30' of me before I made some noise to keep from suprising him. There's three markers on top and the one on the west face is the highest point. There's a bottle covered by a red coffee can at the highest point. I wish I had more time to look through the names but I wasn't sure about how long it would take me to climb back down. It took 3 hrs to make the climb, one of those hours was just to get to the base of the mountain. From the best I could determine, climbers started logging their visits in the jar in the early 1980's. Many of the logs had weathered to the point of being unrecognizable. There were about 50 to 60 names in the jar including a blackhawk helicopter pilot who logged in on his way to bust drug smugglers near the border last year. The most recent log was in May of 2008. I hid a geocache near the location of the jar with a seperate log. The title of the cache is Old Geezers Mtn. Looking from the top I determined there's 3 possible ascents to the top. The one I took (south face) is the most difficult. It looked like the (west face) would be a little easier. The (north face) would be the easiest but the distance to travel would be almost double. I'm thinking about climbing this one again with a tent and bag to get some great sunset and sunrise photo's. Late Feburary when it warms up a little would be a good time, I wouldn't want to climb this one when the snakes are active again because of all the scrambling involved. I'm including a picture of a javolina from google images. Janice made me a big pork chop dinner and I was still hungry an hour later. The Seahawks beat NY Jets today so I think this was about as good as a day can get... :)
You can click on the pictures to enlarge them. If you have time leave comments so I know someone's looking. thanks
1 comment:
Well Bob, thats sounds like a lot of hard work on that climb but boy, are those some nice pics. the colors in that pan-stitch from I assume the top are just beautiful.
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