Assault on Flat Top 2010

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  very steep. The view from the top is spectacular, as you can see in the pictures.  My son in law Matt Hodson accompanied me on the hike, it was nice to have someone to hike with this time and also it's nice to know a route and not have to find one. We started at 7:30 AM from the BLM corrals about 1 mile north of the Border Patrol Headquarters in Why.  There's three markers on top and the one on the west face is the highest point.  Last year there was a bottle covered by a red coffee can in front of  the pile of rocks at the highest point, unfortunatly someone has taken the jar full of names that goes back to the late 70's.  There were over 60 legible names and many other faded out ones in the jar.  I hid a geocache near the location of the jar with a seperate log last year, if you know where the original jar was you will find the cache about 18' due west of the old location and your invited to sign in to that list.  It's hidden under a small overhanging rock with 4 or 5 rocks guarding the face of the opening and the coordinates are N 32 18. 7498  W 112 42.9674  it's a plastic glad food container.  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 we took (south face) is the most difficult. It looked like the (west face) would also be very difficult or impossible without some climbing equiptment. The (north face) would be the easiest but the distance to travel would be almost double.   The last picture will show the route we took,  if your going to take this hike you need to be in good condition and have some climbing experience, the last 1/3 of the hike requires two points of attachment to something solid.  It took 2 hrs and 15 minutes to get to the top and the same amout of time to return to the corrals.  It's a 9 mile round trip.  My wife and daughter in law meet us at the completion of the hike with a couple of well deserved ice cold beers. 

Looking nw

Approx. route to top

A couple of short video clips below