We waited only ten minutes for stragglers in La Puerta before leaving for the roadhead. The leader, fearing the consequences of not enough parking and too much soft sand, made the group stop much too soon. It was very warm as we started across the flats toward the range, walking on the road that should have been driven. So while son Harvey returned for his pickup and roared by us with a load of lazy climbers into a sand wash whereupon he went POOF. About this time Eric Schumacher came running across the desert from where he had parked the night before. Eric had known the roadhead in advance as this was his third or forth trip to the area. He wanted to know why we were walking and then muttered something about idiots as he ran back to his car. He proceeded up the road that he was on until he had to pull over to allow a gravel truck to pass. POOF.-2. The peak is only about 3500 feet high but is extremely rugged. There are sand washes to slog up, boulders to hop over, waterfalls to pass, steep, hard, loose, decomposed granite slopes to ascend, and a ridge to traverse. The range contains dense Sonoran desert plants, beautiful granitic cliffs and canyons, and superb views of Laguna Salada, the Sierra Juarez, and the Sierra San Pedro Martir (Big Picacho was visible). The climb was clearly going to last until after dark. Bud and Bep Bingham showed uncommonly good sense for desert peakers by turning around early. Four others stopped at the summit ridge and Eric and Joan Hack proceeded somewhere in between. The group started down with everyone going at his own pace leaving the leader on the summit to offer congratulations to Eric as he finished the list. He said that he and Joan were going to descend slowly and that we should not wait for them. So we all staggered down the mountain at various speeds. Bob Herlihy made it before dark. Betty Dessert and Paul Lipsohn took a wrong turn and had to climb over a low ridge in the dark to find the cars. Larry Fink led the middle group back and was pulling Wilson's truck out of the sand as Karl Bennett, Ed Treacy and I stumbled over the moonlit rocks with Jerry Keating, old heat exhaustion himself, and Andy Smatko, two and a half weeks after a hernia operation. And he should know better. We moved camp up closer to the end of the road and in doing so - POOF-3. About 10:30 we retired to the sack to fight off the voracious Imperial Valley mosquitoes - we lost. About midnight Eric and Joan came wandering in and wanted to know where their car was. It hadn't moved. MT TIPTON and MT McCULLOUGH   -   John Vitz The Hualapai trip had drawn a crowd and had been terrible. So the word was out on these Vitz-Haven trips into Western Arizona. The leaders were even skeptical about the quality of the Cerbat Range and so they had high hopes that no one would show up at the 7 am meeting time - once again, thanks to our trip chairman. About 7:10 after sweating out a number of California cars, it looked like we would be alright. We got out the maps and were plotting the route to Toroweap for a weekend of beer drinking and relaxing. And then Rick Lane surprised us by driving up on a Honda 750. He had come all the way from LA in the cold. So cursing him to ourselves we drove off towards the roadhead for Tipton, the high point of the north end of the Cerbat Range. We pulled off at an angle turn and stopped to wait for him. VRRR00000MMM - right past. We stood there in disbelief as he roared across the desert towards Lake Mead sixty miles away. Finally it dawned on us that his brain had been frozen by the long, cold ride. About 45 minutes later, after covering about 60 miles and outrunning several Arizona Highway Patrolmen, he was back and we continued on to the roadhead in a canyon northwest of the peak. It took us about three hours to climb through the pinyon-juniper forest, over and around granite cliffs and outcroppings, to the ponderosa covered summit. Tipton turned out to be everything we had hoped the Hualapais to be, a peak much like a cross between Granite #1 and New York.

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