A peek at Signal Peak

Things always look simple on the map. You just drive down this road turn on that road, and zippy do da there you are ready to start your hike. Yesterday the Kadizzlites made their assault on Signal Peak.

The first thing to do on a day with a long hard difficult hike is do a BDS. A BDS is Brain Dead Stupid. The Brain Dead Stupid thing we did before the main event was to visit Palm Canyon. We took a short hike up a canyon to see some rare palm trees that had managed to survive in a crevice. The reason this was BDS is because it wasted valuable hiking time that was needed for the main event. Lesson learned it is BDS to take a short hike when you have a long hard hike planned.

Now to the main event, the assault on signal peak. The gravel road leading to Signal Peak is seven miles long. It is one of those cleverly designed roads that just keeps getting worse and worse at such a gradual rate it keeps leading you on. The great part of these roads is if you have a wife like Jasper Littlebottom along. At some point Jasper will say "I don't think we should go any farther". Jasper will say this at ever more frequent intervals and with ever louder volume. At about 5.5 miles into the canyon Jasper was going pretty wild assuring Kadizzle the truck would be ruined. We pushed on to 6.8 and Kadizzle started to believe we may not be able to turn around and would indeed be stuck. So at 6.8 we got out and walked to the trail head.

As it always does it turned out as soon as we started walking on the road it got better we could have made it all the way. The road was one of those deals where you can just barely squeeze between two rocks, or you can just barely clear one big rock in the middle of the stream bed and of course you scratch the didly out of you truck trying to avoid rocks.

Finally at the start of the hike we had to scramble up a rocky stream bed. Next we start straight up the side of the mountain on loose rock, and then straight up some more. Since we had earlier eaten up precious time with our Brain Dead Stupid routine we now were about three quarter the way to the peak and it was about three in the afternoon. The trail seemed to be getting only worse and we had already encountered areas we had to cling to rocks and climb. The prudent thing to do was go back down. Coming off a mountain in the dark on marble rolling rocks is not a good idea. We made it down and both agreed it was a very scenic and nice area. Hopefully we have been vaccinated against BDS.