EISPIRATEN

I just got back from Disneyland. I mean, Baja. The goal was to summit El Picacho del Diablo, as it has been the last two times. Here're the reports for the really impressive first attempt and the slightly less impressive second attempt.

After these attempts I eventually got even less excited about sitting in a car for a long time, mostly forgot about this, and moved on to other things. Until recently, when Mihai mentioned about going there with guides, where the transport into and out of the park would be a part of the deal. I wasn't excited about being chaperoned, but not having to do any driving sounded GREAT. And what really sealed the deal for me was the fact that we would be transiting the mountains: entering on the Pacific side, and exiting on the Sea of Cortez side.

I REALLY loved everything about this trip. The area is incredible, and this kind of guiding was really nice. It was more like hiking with a friend that has been there before than anything else. They'll show you the way, and if you really fuck up, they'll try to bail you out. Our guides, Arturo and Jorge spent a lot of time in this area, and it was great to talk to them about their experiences.

This whole place is wild and rugged. After the trailhead there are no trails or human anything anywhere. There's very little trash, and we picked up everything we found. You don't even see roads in the distance. Or airplanes flying overhead for that matter.

Some of the locals are trying to rebrand this peak, to remove the negative connotations of the Diablo. It's called either Picacho la Providencia or Cerro de la Encantada. I just call it "Picacho" here.

I'm not including all the photos here, to keep this reasonable. The full set lives here.

Alright, so unlike the past attempts, this would be a 4-day backpack instead of a 1-day sprint:

• drive to the park, approach, camp at Campo Noche
• summit, descend, and spend another night at Campo Noche
• hike out downstream to almost the end of the mountains
• finish hiking out, drive back

Approach

We crossed the border at 4AM-ish, got picked up, and headed towards the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park. The road up to the park is paved. The park entrance is at ~7000ft. The whole place is very lightly visited, but the gate still has a pair of bored military dudes with machine guns. Registration included a required photo of everybody's shoe tread, so that you could be found by your footprints, or something.



With that out of the way, we kept driving towards the trailhead. At this point, the van wasn't smelling very good, and was clearly burning coolant. It could be seen dripping out. No worries. We drove until it couldn't go anymore. Then we stopped for a few minutes, poured some water in, and finished the drive. No worries at all. At the trailhead (8100ft) we got our stuff ready, and headed out



Here you're walking through a real nice pine forest, gaining elevation not very quickly. There's a use trail here and there, but mostly you're travelling cross-country. Cool rock formations are everywhere.



Eventually, after 5 miles you climb up to a saddle at 9300ft:





Here you can finally see across the mountains to the Sea of Cortez side, and get the first peek at Picacho and the canyon on the other side.





Gnarly. Here the route traverses to the E a bit, before dropping STEEPLY 3000ft down a gully. The reason you lose 3000ft here instead of sticking to the high ridge is because this ridge looks like this:



I guess doable, but way above my pay grade. We kept it exciting too, and our traverse looked like this:



The orange box Arturo is carrying is the new register for the summit. The descent is real steep



but has cool views





Eventually you drop down to the creek



and set up at Campo Noche at 6300ft.



Campo Noche is just a few flat spots and a fire ring by the river. There's no development at all.

Summit

Summit day! We started walking a bit past sunrise. You more or less go steeply straight up from camp, and eventually end up on top. It's a rocky gully the whole way. The easy lines are all class 2-3. Tons of climbable rock is everywhere, and plenty of harder options exist. The bottom:



Not the peak (correction: upon further reflection, that is definitely the peak)



This place is cool











Approaching the top, you get to "wall street", a steep corner of flat slabs





It steep, but not enough to require any tech equipment: grippy shoes and holding onto the wall is fine. Eventually you can see the secondary summit and the gnarly ridge between the two summits:



And after some more climbing



you're on top at 10200ft!





There's a very civilized register full of names, listing the various records of people climbing quickly or prolifically from various directions. It was real nice to see that 99% of the entries were Mexican.

Cool views from above. The observatory:



The previous day's approach:



The saddle we crossed is towards the left, and you can see why we traversed to the left from the saddle, instead of dropping straight down.

The secondary summit:



No, this isn't San Jacinto because Palm Springs isn't there:



We hung out for a bit, and went back the same way, returning a bit before sunset.

Exit

We approached, and we summited, so now we're almost done, right? Wrong! Now we follow the canyon out. This is all downhill, but it's also trail-less and very rugged.

We left a bit after sunrise at Campo Noche:



As you descend, the trees become more sparse





This place is cool



We passed pool after pool after pool after pool. A SMALL sampling:











Some people enjoyed this more than others





It's rugged, with lots of scrambling and downclimbs; progress isn't quick. There's a LONG narrows section in the middle with many narrow bypasses just above the water.



Eventually it opened up a bit, with some sandy banks here and there.





I found a lucky bobcat foot





But at this point we were clearly following some bighorn and mountain lions





Eventually the mountain lion caught up



This apparently happened a few weeks before as well



After 9.7 miles at 2800ft we finally had enough, and set up camp for the night



After a starry night, we set out right after sunrise again. The canyon narrowed once again. We found a cave that the critters really like, and went through





Apparently this is often clogged by sand. And if it is, you downclimb this rope instead



We climbed up



to bypass this



The lions like this place too





We're now approaching the exit, and the most technical obstacles are here. First off, a cable ladder is here to aid a long downclimb. One of the cables is broken, and the other one is hanging on a bolt that is past its prime





If you fall, you go swimming



Onwards





You get to a sheer-walled pool with a fixed cable to aid the traverse across to a ledge. Looks like this from the bottom:



The non-load-bearing side (used primarily to pull the cable back for the next person) is fixed with a rock anchor



and consists of 3 different ropes, one of the knots holding a pulled-out bolt for some reason.



This works well enough



as long as you maintain your speed.



We tried to pull him across



But it wasn't enough, and he went swimming.

And after a few more pools, you're out!



The native americans knew about this canyon, and there're lots of petroglyphs here (click, and look at the center of the image)



Now we were home free. After a walk in the desert



we found the van, and were whisked away to tacos and, eventually, the border.



This wasn't the day hike I originally envisioned: we put in 3 full days and 1 half day. If the group was stronger, doing this in 3 days would be easy, but 2 would be very hard. Doing this on your own is relatively straightforward on the Pacific side: the drive to the park is easy and paved, and the entry fee can be paid at the ranger station at the gate. The peak and the canyon on the other side are on private land, and there's some fee that must be paid to some ranch people you drive by on the way out. And driving to the mouth of the canyon is a long, sandy road. Accessing that yourself would require more work.

This was EXCELLENT, and I cannot recommend it enough. Arturo and Jorge (from SIMA) were GREAT to hike with. The area is fantastic. Recommended!

Guides on Big Picacho! Thanks for the trip report and photos. Photos below of a climb of Big Picacho back in 1974. Click to the right for the series of photos. This was from the east side. My first try, from the west side, was a failure. We became lost and ran out of water.

Thanks for posting those. That's a big group! Did yall know where to go and what to expect? Did you come in and out along the canyon, and how long did it take? It looks like some of the aids were there already. I feel like I want that 50-year old trip report!

Thats a bucketload of mesozoic granite. (with some lovely older gneiss in the narrows on your way down)

Its no surprise it looks a lot like San Jacinto and Palm Springs - El Picacho mountain is generally speaking the same rock as San Jacinto formed into a mountain the same way.

Super cool trip!

Wow, dima, this looks so cool!!! If you ever want to go back...

Dima,

The leader was John Robinson, so we had the best 'guide' available for free. He is in the summit photo, in the blue down jacket. The trip was not a Sierra Club trip, but nearly everybody was Sierra Club. We chartered a bus to save us the driving. It was a four-day Thanksgiving weekend trip. The reputation of the mountain was that the summit climb was easy Class 3-4 if you knew the route, but could be Class 5 if you lost it, so we were happy to have Robinson as the leader. The approach seemed like the usual obstacle course when climbing on the eastern side of the Sierras, such as George Creek when climbing Mount Williamson.

We had one incident descending from the summit, a woman slipped and fell. I remember her as being Shirley Akawie. She was injured enough that she had to be carried part of the way out. Fortunately she was small, and the larger men volunteered to carry her, but it was still quite a feat. It occurred on a wall that we down climbed facing in, unroped, I believe not far above our camp.

According to Sierra Club legend, there was an earlier climb where a man died of a heart attack, and was buried not far off the route. A factor in making that decision was the awkwardness of showing up at the border with a body in the car.

It is a great mountain. Congratulations, and thanks for all your reports on it.

Great report, that's a lot of elevation gain/loss each day. The water in those pools is amazingly clear!