Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

December 28, 2021

579m

Yuma, AZ

Red Bluff Mountain is a cool-looking but obscured peak off the I-8 corridor not too far from the city of Yuma. This peak also boasts over 300 m prominence. There had been next-to-nothing “beta” on the internet asides from a few “logged ascents” on peakbagger.com. None of those accounts were helpful in any fashion but one did mention “exposed scramble” as opposed to “rock climbing”. This peak had been on Adam’s list for a while and it didn’t take him too long to convince me to try. I generally do not like to gamble on the success so I did spend at least 1 hour zooming-in on various maps. I was confident that we could find a scramble route to the summit, but the decision was still made to carry a rope, harness and basic pros to give a wide range of contingency. Adam’s friend Matthias, another accomplished peak-bagger based in Phoenix decided to join us for two days starting on Red Bluff Mountain.

Matthias had also done his homework and his words were to drive in from the south. The three of us met in Wellton at about 6:30 am and drove north onto those dirt roads in two vehicles. About 1 km from the driveable end the road had become too steep/rough for Adam’s like, so we parked the Subaru and piled into Matthias’ 4Runner with monstrous tires. That vehicle is one of the best I’ve seen for mountainous accesses. We drove up and over one sketchy hill and some more rough spots and parked at where we were supposed to park. Apparently there’s some issues with this peak’s access so do your own research. Meanwhile the sky had been lit up by the Arizona’s gorgeous sunrise.

The general consensus was to use the south slopes that consists of several gullies and ribs to ascend, but to get there we must do about 1 mile of cross country travel on the desert floor with some undulating micro-terrain. In terms of the bigger picture it really didn’t matter where exactly to go, as long as the general bearing was correct. We opted to link up several washes and plodded up and over a few smaller passes before plodding onto the lower south slopes. The exact route we took on the scramble was quite different than what I had pictured from just gazing at the maps, as the actual terrain looked to be a lot less intimidating. We decided to just ascend uphill and decide one step at a time.

We scrambled mostly class 2 terrain for a few hundred vertical meters of gain and bailed left into a major gully system upon reaching the base of a steep section. Continuing farther up the ridge would bring us to the wrong summit while bailing into the gully had some annoying side-hilling and about 50 m of elevation loss. I thought we would cut across the gully and ascend the climber’s left side rib but the gully itself looked feasible, so we just scrambled in the gully. We encountered a few dry-falls and some bushy sections with some unavoidable 3rd class scrambling, but no real exposure. The top of this gully leading towards the col between the main and central summits had lots of treadmill scree. We ascended the climber’s left side of this zone on mostly bigger rocks and soon topped out on a small summit on the south ridge of the main peak.

Seeing the route ahead we made the decision to ditch all of the unnecessary climbing gears. I decided to just simply ditch the entire backpack as the route ahead looked to be really short. After a short down-climb to the saddle we easily scrambled the uppermost south ridge to the summit. The scrambling was again, mostly class 2 with maybe a few class 3 moves. The register revealed a few more ascents than what the internet suggested, but overall this was still a very obscured peak with no more than one ascent in several years.

We talked about to descend a different route to close in a loop, but we couldn’t see the entire picture and the last thing we wanted was to get cliffed out. The decision was then made to retrace the same route despite that annoying 50-m side-hilling re-ascent. The descent of that gully was also not quite pleasant with some loose terrain and we also missed the easiest line down through that dry-fall and down-climbed some harder 3rd class steps. The rest of the return was uneventful and the entire hike turned out to be much shorter than anticipated. Given the time of the day we made the new decision to drive into the Castle Dome Mountains to scramble Thumb Peak in the afternoon, as otherwise we would have been wasting the previous daylight time.