Whipple Mountains

1974

By: John Vitz

none

WHIPPLE MADE EASY or the return of DPS Dropout

Rejoice DPSers--a new route from the firm that gave you the backside routes to Orocopia and Jacumba (thereby reducing both to trivialities), the interesting and obscure (but most direct) Spectre crack route as well as others. This amazing discovery cuts miles and hours off the ascent of this rarely visited desert crud heap. The old route of cross country, canyon, and ridge hiking has been replaced by a third class drive and a first class canyon walk.

Using the same formula of map reading which led us to the aforementioned successes and numerous failures (such as the 8 mile each way hike across desert pavement to get Palen from the west or our northern Inyo exploratory to get Waucoba) we managed to stumble upon the Whipple Mine route. Since Whipple is an ugly mountain in general, any aid to its conquering should come as a great relief to many of you. Not counting, of course, the likes of Bill Banks whose idea of fun is to climb White Mtn. from Tonopah or Kingston from Interstate 15. Bill would rather do Whipple from Blythe than from our little mine. But for the peak baggers and not the masochists, we offer this little route description. Grab your topo and AAA San Berdoo County map and open to the proper places, even you, Paul. (Now that he has taken a geology course Mr. Lipsohn can almost read a topo). 1.6 miles east of the road to Big River and 2.2 miles west of Earp, a graded road leads 1.5, 2.7, and 14.8 miles to a mine in the southern Whipples. It seems that the AAA has not driven the last 3.5 miles of this road recently. About a mile after crossing the Aqueduct, the road leads into a wash and from here to the end it is definitely a VW type road. No serious difficulties except for clearance problems. The road ends at the mine, which was quite an impressive operation, and there is ample flat ground for camping. This mine is shown on the topo as the inactive mine on the bottom edge, almost due south of the high point. The obvious route is to cross the low ridge on which the mine sits and drop into the next wash to the west and follow it to the summit ridge. There are no difficulties. Have a nice time and climb.


Detailed information for visiting one or more peaks mentioned in this article can be found in the
Desert Peak Section Road and Peak Guides

DPS Archives Index | Desert Peaks Section