You might not realize that just an hour’s drive from Vegas, and 10,000 feet higher than the valley floor, is an amazing peak sitting at 11,916 feet.
It’s actually only the eighth highest peak in Nevada, but you can look up the wild and lesser-known topography of Nevada another day. This story is about a loop that never looped, me doing what I do best by putting my friends in danger, and having an absolutely epic day outside.
I grew up in Southern California, so I went to Vegas plenty of times over the years for all kinds of different reasons. Many times, off in the distance, if I had a hotel window facing west, I would see that giant peak, often covered in snow, and think, “I should climb that one day.”
Not too long ago, during edition four of the KETL Mountain Treasure Hunt, I drove a giant, several-hundred-mile triangle around the state of Nevada. I visited isolated, off-the-beaten-path trails, ghost towns that were once gold or silver mining boom towns, and some crazy, weird, wild, epic, and vast landscapes.
The last of the 15 jars I hid during that treasure hunt was in the Spring Mountains Wilderness, where Charleston Peak sits. I hid the treasure jar quite a ways north of the peak, but just getting a taste of that mountain range made me want to go back and explore it more. The terrain, trees, and rocks are all stunning. It’s an amazing place to be.
So I organized a trip where a couple of my good friends from Eastern Canada would fly out to Vegas to hike the peak and then enjoy a couple of normal Vegas activities the following day.
I pieced together a 20-mile clockwise loop, knowing that some of the trails were closed and there had been no recent reports of anyone clearing them because the snowpack was still so high. Those reports were a couple of weeks old, so I figured maybe we could swing it now.
It was an amazing and fairly easy climb to the summit through a ton of beautiful terrain. Even the portions of the trail where a fire had ripped through a few years ago looked awesome. Kind of like Mordor. Just otherworldly, with the way those trees had burned and what was left behind.
My next decision was to skip a large portion of the normal Charleston Peak Trail and North Loop, follow a ridgeline down toward a smaller peak called Devil’s Thumb, and reconnect with the trail from there.
That turned into pretty rugged territory, with a lot of snowpack and rocks, followed by multiple attempts to get back down dangerously steep terrain toward the main route.
That ended with one of my friends essentially saying he frankly wasn’t ready for that level of risk today.
Given how steep the terrain was, and what I had already made him climb down, I thought, “No problem. I’m not going to push you any further than I already have. You’re already shaking, you need to get back to your family, and it should not be my fault if you fall off this mountain.”
So we went all the way back up to the peak, connected to the main trail, and followed it until we eventually ended up in the same scenario: crossing a ton of massive, sketchy snowfields.
Eventually, we reached one snowfield that was so huge and so sketchy that I looked at him, and he gave me the same look again.
So we turned around and went all the way back the way we came, hitting the summit for the third time that day and turning it into a loop that never looped.
It still put us just shy of 22 miles and 7,000 feet of ascent and descent in a single day, surrounded by beautiful nature, unbelievable views, perfect weather, and rugged, sketchy off-trail terrain.
These are the kinds of big day hikes that involve a lot more sketchiness and adrenaline than most people probably imagine when they think of hiking.
Perfect days outside with friends. Go be the person who organizes this kind of stuff with your friends. I promise you won’t regret it.
Jeff Cayley
CEO & Lowest-Paid Model for KETL
