2019 Highpointing, and What Comes Next

MartinPyne_CountyHighPoints — My current county high point completion map.

The limiting factor continues to be distance and vacation time. I was able to ascend White Mountain Peak without taking time off primarily due to Open Gate Day reducing the requisite hiking distance and still didn’t get home until pretty late Sunday night. Eagle Peak and Hat Mountain required pretty much the entirety of Labor Day Weekend just from the sheer amount of driving necessary to reach the Modoc National Forest.

Closer to home, Laveaga Peak and Long Ridge were made possible by the efforts of Coby King to obtain legal access to these private-property peaks.

Frustratingly I was unable to get anything done over Thanksgiving break due to bad weather up and down the state. While it’s possible that my plans for Hot Springs Mountain and Blue Angels Peak would have gone successfully despite the snow, that’s an awfully long drive that can be put off until there’s better weather.

My actual biggest peakbagging achievement of the year is finishing off the Nifty Ninety list of Bay Area peaks. I am not planning on going nearly as hard in the spring as this year’s effort to finish off the list on my birthday, especially as in hindsight that led to a bit of fatigue (and a desire to not burn even more gas) in trying to get much done in the Sierras in September/October this year. But I’m sure I can find something to do closer to home before the snow melts.

The other lesson learned was to not try to crowbar a non-trivial highpoint into a weekend where I’m already busy and tired—hiking is best done before the convention starts. I’m not currently planning on trying to work any highpointing into Westercon weekend. (Note also that July 4th weekend is still pretty early in the season for the Seattle area.)

So what’s next? It’s mostly a question of trying to work out vacation plans. I’m almost certainly not going to Worldcon this year (turns out flights to New Zealand are really expensive) so I am hoping to spend a week in the Sierra sometime in August. It would also be really nice to bump off both the Salmon/Bear duo (likely a Labor Day Weekend target) and the three I have left in SoCal next year, although this may be a tad ambitious given that the latter would likely have to be crowbarred into Memorial Day Weekend and I’m not sure that’s actually enough time considering the drive.

For summer weekend trips, there’s also a number of county prominences that I’m interested in—Granite Chief, Mt. Conness, South Yolla Bolly, Hull Mountain, and Babbitt Peak come to mind.

Longer term, I’m planning on combining my 2021 trip for the Tonopah Westercon with some county high points in southern / central Nevada, as well as a few easy pings in D.C. and environs in conjunction with the 2021 Worldcon.

2019 year-end statistics:

New county high points: 5 (59 total)
Home glob: 51 counties (+5), 138,183 square miles (+14,580)
New 2000′ prominence peaks: 3
New SF Bay Nifty Ninety peaks: 25
Highest and most prominent peak climbed: White Mountain Peak (14,246)
New peaks (min. 300′ prominence) climbed: 22
P-Index: 103

Eagle Peak and Hat Mountain

Eagle Peak (9892′) and Hat Mountain (8745′), the highest points of Modoc and Lassen Counties, respectively, are in the far northeastern part of California, an area that most people haven’t seen. I took I-80 and US-395 to get to the Modoc National Forest and it’s quite striking how the last hour or so of the drive (north of Susanville) is almost completely empty of people. It’s 7-8 hours from Sunnyvale depending on traffic. Some notes:

I didn’t see anybody on either Eagle Peak or Hat Mountain. There was one entry in the Eagle register from earlier on Saturday (noting the visible smoke from Burning Man), but I have to assume that he took a different route up.
There were a good number of others present at the Mill Creek campground on Saturday night. It’s accessible via paved roads and has bathrooms and running water. Luxurious (from a car-camping perspective) if a bit less quiet than I might have liked. (Special shout-out to the campers that kept managing to direct a bright light into my driver’s-side windows.)
The short stretch of trail past Clear Lake is absolutely infested with spiders. Seriously I don’t know how you can get through that section without taking at least one strand of silk to the face.
Eagle really puts the day in dayhike. It took me a bit over ten hours round-trip from Mill Creek Falls (about 5700′), not counting about half an hour on the summit. There are other routes that start higher but have a bit more mileage.
After getting back and taking a bit of a breather I drove further into the forest towards Hat Mountain, this time on gravel roads. The biggest surprise of the drive was the calf on the road.
The stars are absolutely amazing in the Modoc National Forest. Seriously, if you haven’t ever seen the stars from a really rural location like the Modoc, you owe it to yourself to find a moonless night and fix that. There are just so many stars! (And I really need to remember to actually bring my binoculars on one of my overnight peakbagging trips.)
Just as I was getting ready to sleep on Sunday night, I was surprised to find somebody driving up Forest Road 38N18. We chatted briefly and he confirmed that the road was in good shape.
The standard route up Hat Mountain involves a 600-foot descent through brush to Lost Lake. I got partway through this two years ago and turned around in disgust. (The rainstorm the previous night didn’t help.) This year, Kimberly St. Clair tipped me off about an improved route that involves driving a few miles down 38N18 and taking mostly roads/trails from there. This route is a huge improvement. There’s minimal bushwacking and only a 200-foot elevation gain on the way back, much of which could have been further reduced if I had driven a bit further. The first three miles of 38N18 past its junction with 38N18A are a somewhat rocky road but nothing a Subaru Forester can’t handle.
Amusingly there are actually two registers atop Hat Mountain because it’s not entirely clear where the exact highest point it. I of course tagged them both. (The better view is probably slightly lower.)
I didn’t get much (okay, any) reading done this weekend because I didn’t get to either trailhead until after sunset. Part of this was because I extended my trip to the area a bit by stopping at a couple Half Price Books locations to take advantage of their 20% weekend sale. I picked up five books, the highlight being a first edition copy of Iain M. Banks’s Inversions.

So that’s California county highpoints 42 and 43 done. Next up, in all likelihood: Thanksgiving weekend for the San Diego and Imperial high points. Plus Orange if I can figure a legal route up Santiago Peak post-Holy Fire.

2018 Highpointing, and What Comes Next

I didn’t have a particularly productive year in terms of county highpointing in 2018. The biggest reason for this is simple distance. With a couple access-related exceptions, I’ve now climbed every county high point that can be done in a single day from my home. The other problem is time and energy. I did San Gorgonio Mountain and Mt. Eddy, this year’s two ultras, as full-weekend trips, but that does require spending pretty much the entire weekend away from home, and with the usual schedule of “hike Sunday morning and then drive back” that means going pretty much right from a long drive to bed to work.

The other issue I ran into was that having a narrow vacation window is a good way to be vulnerable to weather problems. My vacation plan this year was to spend the first half of a week or so near the Nevada–California border and claim successively higher high points, then head back home and go to the Worldcon. Unfortunately, the week in question was plagued with atmospheric instability that led to two of three hikes having to be aborted early; I didn’t even bother attempting White Mountain Peak given the low likelihood of pre-thunderstorm success and car-camping fatigue.

I’m not sure what lessons to take away from the above. I don’t really have a way to try to reschedule vacations on short notice based on the forecast. The best plan would have probably been to go somewhere else, although in this particular case the need to get advance permission from the Army for Mt. Grant would have made that difficult as well. Still, worth noting for future years.

In 2019, I am planning on hiking Thurston Peak, high point of Davis and Morgan Counties in Utah, at some point over Independence Day weekend in conjunction with Westercon. (There will be ribbons.) Apart from that, I’m not really sure what county high points are on the docket for next year, as I will be using most of my vacation time on a trip to Ireland for the Dublin Worldcon. (As I do not expect to have a car there, sadly neither Carrauntoohil or Kippure are likely.) I might look at using some or all of Labor Day Weekend to tackle Hat/Eagle or Salmon/Bear. Depending on snow levels, it might also be possible to leverage Memorial Day Weekend into a couple county high points. I’d still really like to get White Mountain Peak done, but I’m not quite sure how to acclimate sensibly over the necessarily short amount of time I’d have.

In the mean time, there are still plenty of other peaks to ascend. I have twenty-five peaks remaining on the SF Bay Nifty Ninety list, and hope to finish them off in the first half of next year. The biggest limiting factors here are Brushy Peak, which can only be legally accessed via a $40+ tour that you have to sign up for, and the peaks in Henry Coe that are best accessed via the seasonally-closed Dowdy Ranch entrance.

There are also plenty of unclimbed peaks (e.g. Konocti) relatively nearby with 2000 feet of prominence, are the most prominent point in their county, or are otherwise of interest (e.g. South Chalone Peak, the Pinnacles Wilderness high point). If nothing else, Tahoe is still fairly close and has plenty of interesting mountains that are not county high points. Hopefully 2019 will see less fire and smoke.

Here at Acrophilia, I’m hoping to keep the posts about peaks climbed in the last couple years coming at noon on Fridays until I’m caught up. No guarantees, but that’s the schedule I’m working towards.

2018 year-end statistics:

New county high points: 6 (54 total)
Home glob: 46 counties (+7), 123,603 square miles (+37,211)
New 2000′ prominence peaks: 5
New SF Bay Nifty Ninety peaks: 34
Highest and most prominent peak climbed: San Gorgonio Mountain (11,499′)
Highest point reached: the side of Boundary Peak at about 12,480′
New peaks (min. 300′ prominence) climbed: 22
P-Index: 93

2017 County Highpointing, and What Comes Next

Absent an unexpected travel opportunity, I’m done with county high points for the year. It was a fairly productive year in terms of my original goals, but there were still plenty of lessons to learn.

My big push for this year was to get most of the Lake Tahoe-area high points, and this was very successful. The only county high point that remains for me near Tahoe is Snow Valley Peak, high point of Carson City. I also tagged a few other county high points in the northern Sierras. As a result, I was able to extend my home glob into Nevada—more on that later.

I also had a multiday trip through Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon for this year’s total solar eclipse. The part of this trip that centered around the eclipse was wildly successful, as I had a wonderful view of the eclipse from the high point of Gem County, Idaho. However, I didn’t plan the second half of the trip as well as I should have. Poor weather and a lack of adequate research led to failure on Hat Mountain, high point of Lassen County, and no attempt on Eagle Peak, high point of Modoc County. In the future, I’ll do a better job of checking the weather and planning for an entire trip, although a lack of eclipse focus should help here too—I paid almost exclusive attention to making sure I’d have a clear spot to view it.

Despite the problems with this trip, I was able to extend my home glob into Oregon by ascending Crane Mountain (and Mount Rose, a couple weeks later), and added a significant amount of glob area in Oregon by ascending Granite Peak. I now stand at 48 county high points, with 39 (across three states and 86,392 square miles) connected.

So what comes next? I’m almost out of county high points that I can hike without sleeping anywhere but my own bed, so my next targets (outside of Los Prohibidos) will likely be weekend trips, with the possibility of a longer trip or two thrown in. My current priorities, in no real order:

I was hoping to ascend San Gorgonio Mountain, the highest point in Southern California, this summer, but after an exhausting Sunday combining San Jacinto Peak and the drive home I decided that quidditch weekends and highpointing weekends should be separate. I should be able to do this next summer, globbing both San Bernardino and Riverside Counties. (Santiago Peak would also be nice if I have time.)
With better planning and fewer fires, the Hat/Eagle combo in far northeastern California should be a fun weekend. It would be cool to find a route up Hat that doesn’t involve the annoying descent to Lost Lake, but I can deal with that if it’s drier and I’m not worried about thunderstorms.
The rest of the northern tier of California is also on my high-priority list, subject to feasibility. Mt. Eddy (ultra!) is the obvious pick. Salmon Mountain and Bear Mountain would be obvious, but last I heard the road to Bear Mountain is impassible from last winter’s storms. Hopefully that will be repaired sooner rather than later.
As I mentioned above, Snow Valley Peak is the last county high point I haven’t ascended near Tahoe, and it’s also one of the last doable in a (very long) day from home.
I want to start seriously pushing towards a Nevada completion. Nevada’s easier to complete than California, due to a lack of access issues, fewer counties overall, and no apex high points. I don’t expect to complete Nevada next year but I’d like to make some headway.
Similarly, I’d like to extend my home glob into Idaho and connect the three counties I already have there. Unfortunately Humboldt County doesn’t have adjacency with Idaho, so that means—in addition to Cinnabar Mountain—either BM Stevenson, a notorious tire-killer, or Ruby Dome, which is reportedly both quite fun and the hardest county high point in Nevada. Again, I don’t really expect to glob Idaho next year, but 2019 maybe?
And finally, some inroads into the High Sierra. White Mountain Peak (14er!) would be the obvious starting point, I think. (Although White Mountain Peak isn’t actually in the High Sierra, but the nearby White Mountains.)

In the mean time, there are plenty of Bay Area peaks to climb this winter. That is, if the worst fire season anyone can remember ever ends.

Pictures from this summer’s highpointing adventures can be found on my Facebook.