The Desert Committee led this trip under the
leadership of Jim Schoedler, and assisted by M.V. The participants were John
McCully, Carol Smetana, Anna Valkass, Wendy Ruess' brother, Christine Mitchell,
and Ron Bartell, J Holshuh and Sue Leverton..Last time we scheduled this trip, we were rained out. This time, the weather promised to be great. We did Marble approaching from south west. There is a fairly good dirt road for high clearance cars that lead you close to the range. We charged off, under M.V.'s leadership on an expected hike of about one hour. It turned out that the point was a false one, and the correct one was about a mile further to the right. Fortunately, we could follow an easy ridge without too much loss or gain to the real summit. Along the way we saw several big horn sheep. We descended down a different gully and navigated our way back to the cars. This made a nice hike out of this peak. Dave Jurasevich left the register on the summit, and had signed in 45 minutes after leaving his car on the pipeline road north east of the peak.
Next day we did Clipper. This took us longer than we expected, but the hike was straight forward to the summit.. The weather also changed. Storm came in, it was fairly cold, started to rain in various locations and we had snow flurries near the summit. This hike would have been ok, but the proximity of the freeway (US 40) and the noise from traffic did not make it as pleasant.
Maris
Valkass
THANKSGIVING 1993 - WEAVERS NEEDLE
Apache Junction has changed since I last climbed the peak ten years ago. There is now a freeway with four exits instead of highway intersection with a gas station and store. We had a little problem rendezvous with George Toby and Ron Young Thursday afternoon. Finally we made contact and were able to camp together. Bruce and Terry Turner and Anna and I caravaned together from Banning.
We camped out in the open desert near the trailhead for route B for the Superstition Mountain. Anna and Terry prepared a great meal with George and Ron supplying the desert. The day was warm, but that night it got windy and cool. We had a good campfire, but we did not stay up too late because of the early start next morning.
We left our campsite at 6:30 and drove about a mile to the trailhead. We started hiking at about 7:00. We chose the approach from the east. The desert was beautiful and the weather was great. We lost about a half an hour by losing the trail in a wash and starting to follow the one leading to Geronimo Cave, which we had to backtrack.
When we arrived at the base of the mountain, two climbers were coming down. This gave us time to get our harnesses on and rope straightened out. The climb went smoothly. On the summit we met another party of three climbers from Riverside. After taking our summit photos, we descended to the level below and ate our lunch. When we got down to the notch to do our 150 foot rappel, we had a small traffic jam. Two guys were coming up, and the three from Riverside