Story Pop: Tule Peak, NV - A Short Scrappy Volcanic Ascent

Tule Peak doesn’t look like much from the basin floor — a quiet volcanic rise above the sagebrush, a radio tower, a ridge, nothing dramatic. But the Great Basin loves to hide its teeth, and the moment you start climbing, Tule Peak reveals what it really is: a short, steep, wind‑scoured punch of effort that hits far harder than it looks.

In this Story Pop episode, we step into the grit, gradient, and volcanic ribs of Nevada’s Tule Peak and use its deceptively tough profile to explore how the Blisterpop Difficulty Scale uncovers the real shape of a climb. Tule Peak scores a 47 out of 100 — HARD — not because it’s long or technical, but because it’s honest. It’s steep. It’s loose. It’s exposed. And it never gives you a break.

If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t just want to look at a mountain but wants to feel it under your feet, this one’s for you.

BlisterBlog: BlisterPop Difficulty Scale

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

This is Off You Pop, the podcast for hikers and adventurers who want to be epic in just one day. Today we're going to talk about Tall Peak. It's one of those mountains that hides its truth until you're standing at its base. From the basin floor, it looks like a shrug, a quiet volcanic rise above the sage bush, a radio tower, a ridge, nothing dramatic. But the Great Basin has a way of disguising its intentions. Because the moment you start climbing, Tall Peak reveals what it really is: a compressed mountain. A short, steep, wind-scoured punch of effort that hits harder than it looks. Today on Story Pop, we're stepping into that landscape. The grit, the gradient, the wind, the volcanic ribs, and we're using Tall Peak to explore how the Blister Pop difficulty scale uncovers the real shape of the mountain. This is Tall Peak. This is Story Pop. Now off your pop. So let's start with the numbers. Tall Peak scores 47 out of 100 on the Blister Pop difficulty scale. That puts it right on the edge of the hard scale. And if you've never climbed Tall Peak, that number sounds absurd. How does a small Nevada summit, barely a blip on the map, earn a score that sits in the same neighbourhood as real mountains? Because a difficulty scale doesn't measure fame, it measures load. Five categories, 100 points, a transparent way to understand what the mountain actually demands of you. And Tall Peak lights up each category in its own Great Basin way. Tall Peak is 8,725 feet in elevation, and it has about 3,800 feet in gain. That puts it on the Great Basin Star Peak at number 9 in the most prominent mountains in Nevada in the Great Basin. So let's walk through the score. So the physical score is 18 out of 40, and this is where Tall Peak surprises people. It's short, yes, but it's steep and it's loose, and it never gives up the m the moment you hit the ground. You gain nearly 2,000 feet in a couple of miles, most of it on volcanic grit that slides under your feet. It's a treadmill of talus, a grind, a climb where your calves and lungs are working from the first step. Short doesn't mean easy. Short means the suffering is compressed. On the environmental scale, it scores twelve out of twenty-five. Tall Peak is a wind corridor. The lake range funnels gusts straight across the ridge. The summit is fully exposed. No shade, no shelter, no mercy. In summer, the lower slopes cook you. In winter, the summit block ices over. In spring and fall, the wind tries to peel you off the ridge. It's not dangerous, but it's relentless. On a technical scale, the Tor Peak scores seven out of fifteen. Most of the climb is class one or two. But the summit ridge, that's where the hands come out. Blocky volcanic steps, short class two moves, optional class three if you want it. Nothing extreme, just enough to make you pay attention. It's the kind of scrambling that wakes you up. From a logistical standpoint, it scores five out of ten. The access roads are inconsistent. Some seasons they're fine, some seasons they're a mess. There are false spurs, misleading tracks, and no signage. It's not complicated, but it's not trivial. On the psychological scale, Tor Peak scores five out of ten. That's the Great Basin effect. You're alone. You can see a hundred miles in every direction. The wind is loud. The footing is loose. The stomach block looks more intimidating than it is. It's not fear, it's presence. It's the kind of climb that forces you to stay in your body. So overall, Tall Peak scores 47 out of a hundred. Hard. Not because Tall Peak is big, but because Tall Peak is honest. It tells you exactly what it is the moment you start climbing. A short, steep, volcanic grind that demands effort, attention, and respect. And that's why it's perfect for Story Pop. Because the difficulty scale doesn't care about reputation, it cares about truth. And Tall Peak delivers the truth in under two hours. So let's get on the trail, and I'm gonna share my experience with you on Tall Peak on this special episode of Story Pop. So Tall Peak is located on the west side of Pyramid Lake, just about 45 minutes north of the city of Reno. So from the city of Reno, you get on the Pyramid Highway, you drive up through Spanish Springs, and as the city dissipates, you find yourself in the desert, and you're looking for a side road called Winnemucca Lake Road. And when you get onto Winnemucca Lake Road, you're almost immediately on the dirt, and you're gonna follow this all the way to the base of the peak. So you'll be driving through some ranches on the east of you, and it's fairly flat, a little bit washbally, but nothing that you couldn't handle in a two-wheel drive vehicle. And then on your left to your west, you're gonna start to see some mountains. You're gonna go past a local area called Moonrocks, that's very popular with ATVers, they like to drive their vehicles all up and over the moon rocks. And you're gonna keep going past moonrocks, and the mountains are gonna start to close in on you. On the west side, on your left are the dogskins, and on the right is the Virginia Mountains, and this is where Tall Peak is. So keep going into the mountains. We dropped a vehicle here right at the beginning, right at the entrance of the valley between the two mountains, intending to do a point-to-point from Tall Peak, and then across the range and back down to the car that we dropped off. I was travelling with uh two hiking friends, Ryan, who hadn't been hiking in a couple of years, and then Jeff, who enjoys hiking but has a lot of family commitments and was excited just to be out on the mountain this day. And we had left Reno, actually Spanish Springs, about 5.30. It was still dark, but by the time we dropped the first car off, it started to get a bit lighter. And then we all hopped into one vehicle in my vehicle and carried on along Winnemuca Lake Road heading north. Uh, you go past a small ranch uh just on the left-hand side of the road. Keep going just a little bit past that ranch, and then there's gonna be a turn-off. Uh, it's a little dirt turn off. What will happen to Winnamukka Lake Road? It's gonna start veering left up into the dog skins and it's gonna start going uphill. If you start going uphill sort of towards the dog skins, you've gone too far. It's just before the apex of that corner. Now, if you've got a two-wheel drive vehicle or something that's not four-wheel drive, you're gonna want to park right here on the road, and you're gonna have a little bit of a trek to get to the base of the mountain. Now, I have a Jeep four-wheel drive, so there is a road that will take you a little bit closer to the base of Tool Peak. And so you just follow that road. It seems to be heading in the wrong direction, sort of heading north up into the valley, but it will hit a barbed wire fence line that's the edge of a ranch, and it'll double back on itself back towards the mountain. So keep going along that road until you hit about the base of where you can see Tall Peak in front of you, and just park up. Park up right there, and this will be the start of your hike. Now, if you're looking for a trail, there isn't one. And if you're looking for a trail anywhere on this mountain, there isn't one. So get out, get out the car, and just survey the route and see what's in front of you. And what you're gonna see is what looks like an old exploded volcano. And what I mean is you're gonna see sort of two ridge lines in sort of an arc form spreading out before Tall Peak in the background. And that's why I think it's an explodive volcano, because it looks like one of those volcanoes that sort of exploded out of the side and blown its bits out. And uh the route that we take or we're gonna take today is gonna be on the right hand side of Tall Peak, we're gonna go up that ridgeline and follow that up toward the mountain. And so when you look up to the mountain peak, when we looked up at the mountain peak on this particular morning, we were quite surprised to see that the mountain was covered in a little bit of cloud, and it was clear that there was a little bit of a dusting of snow. Now, we've been checking the weather the last couple of days before the hike, and it looked like there were going to be some showers, and it was gonna be a little bit windy with some windy gusts. But as it got a little bit closer to the climb, we realized the forecast was changing a little bit on the mountaintop, and there were some forecasts for some snow, some gusts up to 25-30 miles an hour. So that's a that's a healthy amount of wind, and so changed our plans a little bit just in terms of what we were packing, packed a little bit warmer than potentially we were going to, and it was evident that there was definitely a little bit of snow dusting on the top of the mountain. So when you're standing down looking at it, it doesn't look that intimidating. With the traverse across the flat valley floor up to the top, it's about three and a half miles. Now, we were intending to do more of a 12-14 hour day by traversing back along the Virginia Mountains and reconnecting with our car back in the back at Winnemucca Lake Road, a couple of miles down the ridgeline. Um, and that was the intent. So we started walking across the Flat Valley floor. What you're gonna do is you're going to find a divide in the barbed wire fence. There's a barbed wire fence that runs along the base of the mountain. It's gonna run continuously along the base of the mountain, but there is a section where it's a much more a well-maintained barbed wire fence, and it'll connect with an at a corner with the barbed wire fence that seems to lead into the mountain. That is private property. But the barbed wire fence does continue, and you can see it's a little bit more ratty and uh a little bit less well-maintained, and there's a place right there where you can cross, get under the barbed wire fence relatively easily, and continue heading up towards that ridgeline just to the right of the mountain. So if you if you continue walking up towards the ridgeline, you're gonna come to a little bit of a dry riverbed, a little bit of a creek, nothing substantial, just navigate through that creek bed and continue up to the beginning of the ridgeline. So everything's fine, everybody's having a great time. It's a nice cool morning, not too cold, there's not really any wind to speak of, and we're just chatting and uh you know, enjoying being out in the mountain and enjoying being in this in this glorious northern Nevada landscape with the dogskins behind us, and as we're starting to climb the whole valley opening up before us. And we start to hit the ridgeline, and this is where the climb begins. Uh, it doesn't begin particularly steeply, but there are a lot of rocks that you have to navigate. So the climb gradually, gradually starts to get steeper and steeper, and you'll pass through a little wooded copse as you start to climb up above the valley floor, and this is where the climb really begins. You can see the ridgeline above you, it's getting steeper and steeper and steeper, and you know that you have to climb up that uh ridge to get to a little saddle that takes you up to the top of Tall Peak, and we're all doing pretty well at this point, and we continue up, uh zigzagging up the ridgeline, making our way through the loose volcanic rocks. It's fairly easy to navigate this part. Uh, there are a couple of scree runs that you'll start running into, and you can choose to sort of navigate up them or navigate around them, sort of through the brush. These are fairly inconsequential, but if you're not paying attention, you can end up kicking a few rocks. And you'll come up to a point where there's sort of one large solo tree in front of you with a little scree run. Good place just to stop and rehydrate and just survey how far you've come. And when you pop around that tree, you'll see a much more substantial climb. So just keep on keep on trucking. It is only gonna get steeper and steeper and steeper, so don't burn your energy this early in the climb. And once you get about a mile and a half, two miles in, you're gonna start to see just how dramatic that face of Tall Peak is. It's sort of hidden behind this volcanic ridge, but behind this ridge, it drops off into some deep canyons and gullies, and you can certainly take on a different navigational route up the mountain, but you can see some real large, sharp, steep outcrops right at the front of the mountain in front of you. There's potentially another route that you could take if you head uh south of the mountain, you can go up the south side. But this is a fairly reliable route up the mountain that'll get you straight up, straight up there. So keep slogging up the ridgeline. Eventually, you're gonna see sort of this final big ascent that takes you up to the central point of this arc of ridges that I'm still gonna call a volcano until somebody proves me wrong. It looks like a good option is to go straight up, and this an outcropping at the top that you can see. It's like this fairly broad, relatively easy to navigate ascent. Uh, instead, what we did is we sort of side-hilled, we got a little bit behind the ridgeline and tried to maintain the gain that we already had and made our climb a little bit more uh subtle and a little bit easier. However, side hilling through grass and loose volcanic rock can be extremely tiring on your on your legs, and you're sort of navigating through some faint animal trails and then just really rock hopping and seeing how you can get through it. And it can really take a toll when you're going uphill, you're trying to navigate this loose rock, you know, jumping between tufts of grass, bits of scree, but eventually we made it up to sort of the apex of these ridges, and there's a little saddle here, and you can stand there, a few dead trees, looking up at the mountain, and that's really where the crux of the climb begins. So if you think it was steep already, when you get to this point, you can just see how steep it is in front of you. So this point is about two and a half miles, and so there's about a mile or so to go to the top, but it's pretty much just straight up. And once again, there's no trail, so you've got to navigate your way through the country here, which just makes it extremely taxing on your legs, especially when the rock underfoot is super loose. And so, Ryan, who this was his first time out on the mountain, he said in two and a half years, so I mean, fair play to him. He came out and he gave it a good shot, but he felt at this point that especially the last bit of side healing we did really had taken it out of him. And it it it was definitely a challenging hike, and I'd you know, I'd forgotten that you know, when you when you first get out on the mountain, this is a hard hike, and uh this is tough for for people who haven't been out on the mountain for a while to really take that abuse on your legs and your body as you're trying to figure your way out through this very rocky and hostile environment. And so, you know, I told him, you know, take a little bit of a break, you know, get some electrolytes in you, eat a little something, let's take a little rest uh and see if you want to carry on or you feel like you can carry on. And so he said he'd give it a go, and uh fair play to him. He he decided to carry on. And so after a little rest, we started the real ascent, the real challenge. You cross the saddle, again, no trail, no path, you're just navigating your way across the saddle to the base of the climb. And I stopped the group just to take a little look at where you're going and how you're gonna navigate. And you so what you'll see is a couple of fairly substantial outcrops that you kind of want to avoid. Now, there's one straight in front of you that's more of a pale color. Uh you can see it, it's a different type of rock and the than the rest of the red volcanic outcropping that's slightly above it, a little bit higher on the ridge. And so, what you want to try and do is navigate a little bit to the north of that lighter outcrop, and then thread the needle, hang a hard northwest into the gap below the tougher, reddy outcrop, and then navigate around that red outcrop to get up, up around and through the outcrops, and then up the mountain. And so you're really trying to thread the outcrops, and it's relatively simple to do that on the way up. When you're looking up from the saddle and looking up, you can sort of see the navigational route, and you think it's going to be easy when you're looking up at it. And I can reassure you it's a little bit trickier than that when you're in it. So Ryan continued up, and uh, we got maybe a couple of hundred yards up the mountain. It was getting steep, it was starting to get loose, the navigation was starting to get a bit trickier, and uh, I could see it in his eyes, he'd he'd had enough, he was concerned about getting back down off the mountain, and he uh he sort of called us together and said he was gonna call it a day here. And you know, I mean for the first time being out on a mountain, being out on a difficult mountain like this, first time in a couple of years, I mean, fair play, it actually come up 2,200 feet in this short two and a half mile section. So that just gives you an idea just of how steep and dramatic it is to go up to this mountain if you're gonna get 2,200 feet in and uh you know, a little over a couple of miles. That that just shows you some of the abuse he took. And Jeff had bought some walkie-talkies with him, bless him, and he gave him a walkie-talkie and we sent him back. He Ryan's actually a fairly experienced navigator in the mountains, he just physical fitness let him down today. And so we were fairly confident he could figure out his way down. I mean, it's not that complicated. We could see the car, so we're only a couple of miles from the car, so we we sent him off his way just with a walkie-talkie for safety in in case he got himself in trouble or he twisted an ankle. And then Jeff and I said, you know, we're gonna go up and we'll we'll tag the peak and we'll call it a day. We won't do the traverse uh today, but we'll at least go up to the top and then come back down, and so we headed our separate ways, and Jeff and I continued on up the peak, and so as it started to get steeper and steeper and rockier and rockier, we sort of had sight of where we were going, uh, but we lost sight of that you know lighter-coloured outcrop and had gotten to a point on the mountain where we were facing the darker red band of outcropping, and I was very concerned about where this band, uh light-colored band of outcrop was because I knew it was quite a dramatic uh drop, and I didn't want to accidentally navigate off of the side of it. So we took advantage of the walkie-talkies and Jeff hollered at Ryan, who we could see had made it back to the saddle at that point, and just asked him to spot us a little bit on where that outcropping was because we couldn't see it when we were up in the mountain, and he let us know that we'd already passed it, and so we when I looked a little to the to the south there, I could actually see the sort of the top of it. So that was that was pretty helpful. And so once you get to that point and you you're coming up against this deep red outcrop, you want to thread the needle here a little bit, head, head to the right, and get go between those two outcrops. Uh you're gonna be navigating scree runs here, and the the the rock is getting really loose. Just be careful, even the big chunks of rock are fairly loose, so you've got to be light-footed and careful as you move up. You might find some you know, some more dusty, looser parts of the rock. And unfortunately, it had rained and it had been snowing on the peak, so all the dust, all the loose dust had consolidated into more solid ground, so it made it a little bit easier to get up the mountaintop. And so once you get around the first set of sort of deep red. volcanic outcrops that you're gonna want to head and swing left swing back north a little bit um because there's another outcrop in front of you it's more it's sort of almost a forced summit it's got a couple of trees on it but swing swing a little north of that keep keep going up keep navigating the rocks well we're sort of gonna avoid that outcropping as well and you can get up and behind it and as you're as you're coming up and behind it you're gonna swing north again so you're sort of doing a little bit a little bit of an S to get up and avoid the outcrops and eventually eventually the steepness lets off a little bit and you'll come up over the ridge line and you can see the top you can see daylight and what's ahead of you is just a bit of a slog the grade sort of tampers off a little bit but you s on this particular day you start to hit a little bit of snow and so we can start to see some snow forming on the ridge and the wind is starting to pick up and we can feel it getting colder. We're walking into more of a snowy landscape and when you look at the plants in the foliage the snow it was definitely last night's snow it was fresh and untouched but it is hanging like horizontally off the plants where the wind has shaped it through a constant barrage throughout the night and we so we continue up we throw some gloves on warm up a little bit keep slogging up the final ascent there's a you can see like a metal pole up on the ridge head towards that if you can see it that'll get you right up onto the summit and when we popped up over the summit Jeff and I and hit the hit the top the wind really picked up and the clouds started coming in the clouds are flying past us the wind is howling we can see the summit block it's not much of anything it's nothing to be concerned of about you just walk up it you walk over the the flat ground very short I don't know a couple of steps up on the summit block and you'll see some cairns and one of the cairns is the register but at this point the clouds are moving quick the wind is really coming in you can feel your body temperature going down we made we found the register we signed the register and then we ducked in on the other side of the summit block a little bit and just got out of the wind sat down and enjoyed the view and the view from here when you can catch it because it was sort of in between clouds is Pyramid Lake beautiful this sort of almost turquoise blue colour lake peeking out far below you through between the clouds and you can see these pyramid shaped tufas that were left over from the Lahotan Sea actually both ends of the lake there's the the mother rock is sort of towards the south end of the lake and it's really the rock that gives the that gives its gives the lake its name and it's a sacred site from for the Pyote and the Washu people and it's on the on the reservation. And then at the north end there are a few smaller little pyramids as well that you can you can glimpse and you can see and across the other side is the lake range and you can sort of see the distinct outcropping of Tohokam a climb we've done we did about a month ago and you can see the backside of Tohokum and how steep and dramatic it is to climb up the Devil's Kitchen. The route that we didn't do because you're not allowed to go there the that's sort of blocked to the public and it's good you know to preserve part of the land in that way. But here we are at the top of Tool Peak we've made it and what's left is the ascent we stopped had a cold burrito and a little bit of rehydration and it was getting a little chilly so we decided it was probably time to get off the top we popped back on top of the peak and the wind was howling and we made some quick work across the summit and then started descending back down to a peak and here's where it gets a little bit tricky and a little bit confusing. You can't see the bottom of the valley and so you are sort of blindly going down the slope and it's fairly it's fairly consolidated and fairly easy going at this point in the peak but the way that the gradient of the mountain is you sort of think you're following it downhill but the grade is actually pushing you north and so while you think you're going straight down what you're actually doing is heading sort of I guess northwest and it's taking you off course and I know this because this is the second time I've made this mistake where I've I felt like I was going straight back down the way I came but I'm actually drifting way north and when you drift way north like this you end up in all those nasty red outcrops and so we sort of popped over the edge of the ridge and could start to see the valley and we're trying to figure out how to navigate and it was clear we had popped maybe 400 yards or so way north of where we had ascended the peak and so we're gonna have to navigate back across and so this is where it gets extremely tricky and extremely nasty because you're now up on top of all of these sort of red outcroppings you have to be very careful on how you navigate them. You certainly don't want to be walking off the edge of edge of them and the wind is still howling you're sort of coming out of the snow when you get to these outcrops but that may not be the case if you're there on a on a more snowy day where the snow levels drop down you may be navigating it with ice and snow as well so you have to be extremely careful when you're navigating through this route. And so we had dropped out of the snow line at this point and the wind has started to die down. I was trying to get some feeling back in my fingers had some terrible gloves with me that really made my fingers sting a little bit and just trying to figure out a way through through these outcrops and the challenge is that even when you can navigate through the larger outcrops it's extremely loose sharp volcanic scree runs through fairly hostile desert plants that are going to scrape and scratch at you. So you're just trying to figure out how you can weave your way and sort of side hill back across and through this terrain and I fell over at least three times trying to navigate them and my mistake was I was stepping on what I thought was a much larger and more stable rock but it was really sitting on top of a very loose a very loose screw and it sort of went out underneath me and I think the third time actually got a little bit of a cut on my back. You have to be careful I mean you could get sustained head injury if you if you fall wrong uh on this rock but you know we took it slow we took it careful and eventually we made it back back on the line that we had ascended but it was it was certainly taxing and uh I can appreciate that Ryan you know dropped out because this on tired legs with the wrong level of fitness this is going to be a really painful and difficult traverse but it certainly didn't get any easier once you're back on the ascent it's much harder to maintain stability when you're going downhill than it is going uphill on these on this very loose volcanic rock interspersed with scree runs. So we navigated around that challenging outcrop and started to come back down to the saddle and eventually we got off off the real steep part back onto the saddle back onto the volcano in air quotes took a little bit of a rest and decided we'll take the more direct descent down rather than side hilling and so at this point I think we were we were back in in the warmth took a couple of layers off and just made our own way back down the mountain I got a little bit ahead of Jeff maybe 10 minutes ahead of Jeff sort of getting down the mountain at pace really training for some future mountains that I've got where I'm going to need to be moving at pace coming off the mountain. The problem was that this mountain is just a boulder field of like apple or melon sized rocks. There's no trail so you're just trying to pick your way through these rocks and constantly every 30 seconds or a minute I'll be kicking another rock or almost rolling an ankle on another rock and it just becomes a painful grind of trying to avoid all of this rock debris. A couple little scree runs but you you head back down into the warmth of the valley and we made it back to the Jeep back into the warmth Ryan was there hanging out and we just uh took a moment to see what we'd take it on and it was about a seven mile round trip it took us about five hours with a lot of stopping and you know starting and messing around but whoa that is a short steep little climb it's not for the faint of heart it's not for beginners there's certainly a few little tricky parts and it uh it packs a punch for only being three and a half miles up so that is tall peak 8725 feet we recorded about 3800 in elevation gain definitely one to put on your list if you're looking for something a little harder and more challenging. Now it's time for you to off you pop.