Mopah Peak from the northwest side. This route was abandoned in favor of a more feasible ascent from the southwest. At the summit, left to right, seated: Tom Corrigan, Lillian I. Casler, Ed Gammon, Pauline A. Saylor. Standing: Bob Bear and Willard Dean.
summit. The northeast face of Mopah is almost vertical and I contoured around the base to the south face where there appeared to be a feasible route upward in a great couloir or gully of broken boulders. It was a hand and toe ascent and as I worked up over the loose debris I came to the conclusion that this was the vent of an ancient crater with the south rim entirely eroded away. Shoulders of rim-rock cut off my view both to the east and to the west. Eventually, I reached a point where the climbing appeared too hazardous for a lone ascent-and turned back where my altimeter registered 3260 feet. Early this year the Desert Peaks section or the Sierra Club scheduled Mopah for one of its week-end climbing expeditions, and as I was to be guide on the trip I went out the previous week to see if I could find a route to the top. Camping at an old stone corral near the base of the mountain, Cvria and	I had the same experience Edmund Jaeger wrote about in his "Desert Campfires" story in the April issue of Desert Magazine. The rocks out of which we had improvised a little fireplace began to explode. I realized then that they were the same type of andesite Jaeger had described, and hastily replaced them with other stones. On this trip I followed approximately the same route as in 1940, but again I was turned back within 500 feet of the summit. I was sure I had climbed higher this time than on the previous attempt. I crawled into a shallow cave to rest before starting down the mountain. There was evidence that bighorn sheep had been using this cave for shelter. A loose rock in a little niche in the wall of the cave attracted my attention, and when I pulled it out there behind it was a little match box containing the card I had left there February 25, 1940, when I turned back at this same place. A week later I camped near the old	stone corral again-but on this Saturday night there were a dozen other campfires, and bedrolls of 42 members of the Sierra Club and their guests were scattered among the rocks on the desert floor at the base of the Turtle Mountains. Bob Bear of the Desert Peaks group was leader of the party, and among those present was Willard Dean, this year's chairman of the Desert Peakers. Within the membership of the Sierra Club, a California organization of which John Muir was one of the founders, are various sections with special interests-the Rock Climbers, the Ski Mountaineers and the Desert Peaks clan. Throughout the year these mountain climbing folks schedule weekend and vacation trips to the various summits in California-and Arizona. Between the Tehachapi Range and the Mexican border are 192 peaks with elevations over 5000 feet, and the goal of all Sierrans who like mountaineering is to become members of that small group which has climbed 100 of these
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