After a night at the great campsite we found between the two Cowhole Mountain ranges (and just off the Mojave Road), we backtracked to the paved Kelbaker Road and headed south to large pullout on the right side of the road. Our destination? Kelso Peak.
Why Kelso? For that matter, why the Cowhole ranges the day before? Here’s the thing: there are tons of peaks and ranges in the desert. Browsing around a topo map reveals all kinds of remote places and appealing peaks. But you have to start somewhere, and when it comes to the desert that somewhere (for me), was Andy Zdon’s Desert Summits book. I’ve gotten completely hooked on climbing desert peaks thanks to this book, and although I’ve also climbed plenty of summits not named in the book, I turn to it for inspiration and feel weirdly compelled to climb everything in it.
When we plan trips to the desert we usually focus on a smaller area (the desert is huge, you guys), and then find things to explore in that area – peaks, canyons, ruins, petroglyphs, etc. This trip was all about climbing new peaks and checking those pages off! Each peak we did on this trip was unique and a different type of climb, and I love how although they are close together, the experiences, terrain, and landscape was completely different.
ANYWAYS, after the satisfaction of enjoying the views from and checking off Cowhole and Little Cowhole, we decided to head to Kelso Peak, a summit that none of us had done before. With a reported ~6 mile round trip with ~1100 ft of gain, it seemed straightforward and we figured we’d have plenty of sunlight left to find a campsite after the hike. That was mostly true, though our final track was 7.6 miles with 1500 ft of gain since we didn’t take the most direct route. I’m going to start with the map on this one. A faint track of an old road leads from the pullout on Kelbaker Road where you can park. This makes for a nice easy hike for the first mile and a half. From there we followed washes on the west side of the mountain, and on the descent we walked along bighorn trails down the north ridge to a wonderful canyon that led us back to the open terrain.
As you get closer to the mountain you’ll have to make a bet – pick a wash to follow. There are several bumps ahead of you. These hills look a little steep, but you can get around them easily by the washes and end up in some nice terrain on the south side of these initial bumps.
We chose to go around the west bump, following an easy, open wash with lots of bighorn sheep prints. On the back side of the hill, there is a maze of washes and low hills, but you regularly get clear views of the summit and one of any number of routes go in the right direction.
We climbed to the top of a couple of little hills to get a better view from time to time, but for the most part if you wiggle through washes towards the drainage that leads to the summit you’ll be good. The pink line on the photo above shows our route up the peak. I really, really enjoyed this part of the hike. There were fresh signs of bighorn everywhere, the rocks reminded me of Joshua Tree, and we even had a few snowflakes flying since it was so cold out.
Closer to the summit the terrain steepened but it was still nice cross-country desert hiking.
The summit is a nice little pile of rocks and we spent as much time as the chilly weather allowed, enjoying views down into the maze of washes and across Mojave towards places like Kelso Dunes to the south and the Lava Flows to the north.
Most of the terrain looked pretty harmless so we decided to explore a different descent route. From the summit we started down the same drainage, but cut north towards the top of the ridge of hills we could see coming in. Sticking to a very well traveled bighorn trail, we contoured down the ridge until it naturally led us into a wide wash. This ended up being the wash just east of the wash we came in on. We saw an arch that is mentioned frequently in trip reports as a landmark, and headed north down the wash, towards the open terrain that we had crossed on our way in where we could connect back with the old faded road.
The canyon we walked through was quite beautiful, and we even came across a guzzler, which is a water station maintained for wildlife. Although we still hadn’t seen any sheep we kept seeing fresh signs and knew they were watching us. In addition to the sheep signs, we saw lots of mountain lion scat. I’m sure they were watching us too. Once out of the canyon we hoofed it back to the old road and walked back to our cars. From there it was a short drive to one of the best desert campsites I’ve ever found – panning around on Google Maps satellite view will often reveal some gems!
