Story Pop: Petersen Mountains, NV - How a Moderate Mountain Can Become a Hard One

Petersen Mountain is supposed to be a moderate Great Basin peak — a clean ridge, a steady climb, a local’s summit. But mountains don’t care about reputations. They care about conditions, weather, and the line you choose.

In this Story Pop episode, we step into a day where Petersen became something entirely different. Snow at the base. Wind ripping across the ridge. Clouds dropping visibility to fifty feet. And instead of taking the standard two‑track, you went off‑trail — straight up the canyon wall from Mud Spring, into the whiteout, onto a ridge that felt more alpine than desert.

We explore how a moderate mountain becomes a hard one, how the Blisterpop Difficulty Scale flexes when conditions shift, and why Petersen’s geology — a quartz‑rich, fault‑lifted volcanic spine — creates a landscape that feels ancient, mineralized, and wild. We talk about the wildlife that moves quietly through its canyons, the isolation that defines the North Valleys, and the way weather can turn a familiar peak into a full‑value adventure.

This is Petersen Mountain.
This is how difficulty changes.
This is Story Pop.
Off you pop.

For moe hiking adventures: www.blisterpopadventures.com

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. And this is Peterson Mountain, how a moderate mountain becomes a hard one. The reminder that the mountain you think you're climbing might not be the mountain you're actually getting. Because Peterson Mountain is supposed to be moderate. A straightforward great basin ridge, a two-track, a shoulder, and a summit. A local's peak, a warm-up. But mountains don't care about reputation. They care about conditions. They care about the weather. They care about the line you choose. And on this day, Peterson Mountain wasn't moderate at all. It was cold, it was windy, there was snow at the base. Clouds dropped onto the ridge and cut visibility to 50 feet. And instead of taking the standard trail, I went off-route, straight up the canyon wall, into the wind, into the white, into the unknown. That's how a moderate mountain becomes a hard one. Not because the stats change, but because you change the variables. Today on Story Pop, we're talking about Peterson Mountain and how the difficulty scale bends and flexes when you step off the obvious line and into real conditions. Because difficulty isn't just numbers, it's weather, it's terrain, it's visibility, it's decision making. It's the moment you look up at a canyon wall and say, that's the way I'm gonna take it. This is Peterson Mountain, and this is story pop. Now off you pop. So the Blister Pop difficulty scale is built on a simple truth. Difficulty is dynamic. A mountain isn't a fixed number. It's a range, a spectrum, a living thing that shifts with season, weather, and the line you choose. On paper, Peterson Mountain is a 45 out of a hundred that puts it on the moderate to hard scale. A short, steep, honest grind in the Great Basin with big sky and low technicality. But that's the baseline, that's the perfect conditions, the standard route, the clear day version. Change any of those variables, and the scores change with them. On this day, everything changed. I didn't take the two track, I didn't follow the ridge from the saddle, I didn't climb in dry sun and stable footing. I went up Mud Spring Canyon, then off trail, straight up the canyon wall, a line that turns class two into class two plus three, depending on the angle. I hit snow at the base, which hides the talus and doubles the energy cost. I climbed into winds strong enough to push you sideways, and once I reached the ridge, the clouds dropped and visibility collapsed to 50 feet. That's not a moderate mountain anymore. That's a great basin alpine day, and the difficulty scale bumps right up. Physical load jumps because snow and wind force constant microadjustments. Environmental load spikes because cold, wind, and low visibility stack together. Technical low rises because off-trail movements become scrambling. Logistics get harder because the line isn't obvious. Psychological load maxes out because isolation and white out equals commitment. The same mountain, a completely different score. That's the power of the difficulty scale. Doesn't measure the mountain, it measures the day. And the Peterson Mountain on this day wasn't a 45, it was more like a 60. A hard mountain, an honest mountain. A mountain that reminded you that difficulty isn't fixed. It's earned. Peterson Mountain, the quartz spine of the North Valleys. Peterson Mountain doesn't look like much from Reno, just a long pale ridge sitting quietly above the North Valleys. But the moment you step onto its flanks, you realize you're walking into a landscape with a very different story. Peterson isn't just a mountain range, it's a geological boundary, a mineral vault, and a wildlife corridor wrapped into one. This ridge is the northern anchor of the Virginia Mountains, a tilted block of volcanic and sedimentary layers that rise sharply from the desert floor. But Peterson is different from the peaks around it. It's lighter, brighter, almost white in places, and that's because Peterson Mountain is built from silicified volcanic rock, rock that's been cooked, compressed, and transformed by hydrothermal fluids rising through fractures millions of years ago. Those fluids carried silica, and when silica calls, it becomes quartz. That's why Peterson Mountain is famous among rockhounds. That's why people come here with buckets and chisels. That's why the slopes glitter in the sun. Peterson is a quartz factory, a place where volcanic history and mineral chemistry collided to create veins, pockets, and seams of crystal, smoky quartz, amethyst tinted quartz, skeletal quartz, clusters that look like frozen lightning. The mountain is full of it, especially on the east side, where erosion has exposed the old hydrothermal plumbing. Geologically speaking, Peterson is a fork-bounded uplift, a block pushed upward along the Honey Lake Fort Zone. That uplift cracked the rock, and those cracks became pathways for mineral-rich fluids. Over time the fluids called, the quartz crystallized, and the mountain became a mineralized spine rising above the sagebrush. And that's the thing about Peterson, it's not just a climb, it's a cross-section of the basin and range story, stretching, breaking, uplifting, mineralizing, and eroding. A mountain built by tension, a mountain shaped by heat. The mountain decorated by quartz. But geology is only half a story. Peterson Mountain is also a wildlife corridor, a quiet refuge tucked between the North Valleys and the Honey Lake Basin. When you climb here, you're moving through the territory of Pronghorn, slipping through the sage like ghosts, mule deer bedding in the juniper pockets, sage grouse exploding from the brush when you least expect it, golden eagles riding the thermals above the ridge, and coyotes weaving their trails across the lower slopes, and wild horses, sometimes watching from a distance, sometimes crossing your path. It's a living landscape, but it's subtle, the kind of wildlife you only see when you're quiet, when you're alone, when the wind is the only sound. And that's the defining feature of the Peterson Mountains. Isolation. This is not a busy trail. This is not a national park. This is not a place where you pass ten people an hour. This is the Great Basin, wide, empty, and indifferent. When you climb Peterson, especially from the mud spring side, you feel that isolation immediately. The canyon walls close around you, the wind funnels through the gullies, the ridge rises into the clouds, and suddenly you're not hiking a local peak, you're standing in a landscape that feels older, wilder, and more remote than anything this close to Reno has any right to be. It's the kind of isolation that sharpens your senses, the kind that makes every sound feel louder, the kind that turns a moderate mountain into a hard one the moment the weather shifts. Because when the clouds drop and visibility shrinks to 50 feet, Peterson becomes something else entirely. A great basin alpine ridge, stripped down to wind, rock, and instinct. And that's the landscape we are walking into today. A quartz mountain, a wildlife corridor, a fault-lifted spine, a place where isolation isn't a risk. It's the defining feature. So let's get on the trail. So I left Reno at 5 a.m. and drove north on the 395 until I hit Red Rock Road. You take Red Rock Road for about 10 miles before you hit Goldstone Road. And Goldstone Road takes you up into the Peterson Mountains. And when you get off the main gravel stretch, you get onto the dirt roads, the jeep tracks that take you really to the very base. When I got there it was still dark. Dawn was just starting to come up. Unfortunately, it was relatively easy to follow the jeep trails across the plain. And you soon find yourself in complete isolation in a great alpine valley. And in the dark, with the sun just starting to peak up and the light coming out of the blue zone, it suddenly hits you. It suddenly opens up. You're in a completely isolated, empty valley. You can't see another living soul. No sign of another person, save for the Jeep trap that you're on. Now, technically it is passable with a two-wheel drive, but I would recommend a four-wheel drive, especially when you go here in the shoulder season where it might be a little bit damp and muddy. I took a Jeep, so it wasn't particularly challenging for the Jeep to navigate the Jeep trails. It was relatively flat for most of the way. Now there are lots of different trails linking into the main Jeep Trail. So do take a map with you and make sure you're heading in the direction that you think you are. I used Gaia to navigate and it felt like it picked up all of the main jeep trails. And I was able to navigate it relatively easily. There is one point where it gets a bit muddy, and you kind of lose the Jeep Trail. I think after a heavy white rain, that could be a little bit more challenging to navigate. And so when I got towards the base of the mountains in the middle of the valley, I headed sharply south, running parallel to the mountains because I wanted to start my climb at Mud Springs, which is a couple of miles south of the main Peterson Mountain Summit Trail. And I'd read a great report online about somebody who went up Mud Springs and was able to go to Cold Peak and then Peterson Mountain and Peterson Mountain South Summit. And so I thought that was going to be my day. We'll have a three-peak day today. It was supposed to be relatively simple to get up the mountain. About 22,000, 2,500 feet elevation gain, at least that's what I thought before I went up the mountain. And then most of the Petersons, the high points of the Peterson Mountains, sit just over 7,800 feet. And I'd estimate we were around 5,000, 5,500 feet at the base of the mountain. So I parked up just off the Jeep Trail, the bottom of a canyon, which was Mud Spring, and got myself ready, and the snow started coming in. And so it wasn't a heavy snow, but it was more of a snow shower. The wind was relatively robust, I would say. Wasn't strong at the bottom of the mountain, but it blew the snow around a little bit. And I thought, you know, this year I've already been in the sweltering heat. And now end of April, beginning of May, here we are standing in the snow. It's freezing cold. I'd worn three layers because I thought it might be a little bit chilly, and I brought a puffy jacket and decided immediately that that needed to go on along with some gloves because it was kind of chilly. It was around 34 degrees Fahrenheit at the base of the mounting, which inevitably it was going to be much colder when you get to the to the ridgeline. So I started out walking up the last piece of the Jeep road. You could probably drive up the last hundred yards or so, but felt better for me to park just a little bit away from the base of the mountain because I wanted to be able to see my Jeep from the top of the mountain ridge in case I needed to orient myself to get off the mountain. And immediately at the end of the Jeep trail, you go into a single track trail into the canyon. Almost immediately, it closes in around you. And there's a dusting of snow on the ground, nothing substantial, but enough to sort of dust the plant life and make the rocks a little bit slick in places. And I immediately got that feeling like this is ambush territory. This is where the mountain lion gets me. But I kind of always get that feeling when I'm going into deep mountain gullies. And I'm not exactly sure if that's a true feeling or not, or something that really happens. Just in my mind, psychologically, I feel like when you get into a canyon like that, it's a great place for a mountain lion to be waiting to pounce down on top of you. I'm not sure if that's ever actually happened or not, but I always tend to get that feeling when I'm there when the rocks are above you. There's lots of sort of overhanging outcrops and caves where animals could could hang out. But there wasn't a mountain lion. I did have my hood up, and so I didn't have a very good sense of sound. I couldn't tell what was going on around me. The wind was kind of whipping already. I just sort of had the rustle of the hood against my ears and spent a lot of time looking back, just and looking around and sort of visually just checking there was no mountain lions out there. And I didn't see any. The canyon goes up at a relatively gentle grain. In places uh there's a little bit of loose rock, but generally it's fairly easy to navigate. But that early on in the climb, you're sort of getting your mountain lungs in, you're getting your legs underneath you. Now, my legs hurt. And my legs hurt because I'd done something a little bit idiotic a little bit earlier in the week. I'd been in St. Louis and decided I was going to do a stair challenge and basically climb 2,600 feet up and down the stairs, and my legs were still feeling it. When I got out of bed in the morning, I could feel them aching. I had to sort of work the lactate out of them a little bit. And certainly at the beginning of the climb, they were feeling a little bit achy. But I reasoned the best way to get it better was to get moving, get that lactate moving, and really start recovery by climbing another hard mountain. Now I say that out loud, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but anyway, here we were. Snow coming down, blowing around, and the canyon takes a sharp northerly turn. At this point, looking up and out of the canyon, I really wanted to be out of the canyon because I had a real concern about canyons that they dead end, you get deep into a canyon, and suddenly you could become up against a wall of rock or an extremely challenging and difficult climb. This comes from a couple of prior experiences. And I could see the ridgeline above me, and there was a gully at that point, at that inflection point, that ran down into the canyon that seemed moderately steep and totally plausible that you could climb up it and get to the sub get to the ridgeline. And that's what I really wanted to do was get up on that ridgeline as soon as I could, get out of the canyon, but really gain the altitude immediately. And I think if you take the traditional two track up to Peterson Mountain, it's a little bit further north, there's a gate, there's a sign. It looks like you sort of take the same direct direct directory. You climb immediately to gain the reach line. So we weren't doing anything that wasn't not expected on the Peterson hike. The problem was there was certainly no trail. There was a fair amount of foliage, you know, desert plants, some particularly thorny and uninviting, and no trail. And the ground underfoot was a mixture of granite boulders, very stable, not loose, but a loose sort of loamy sand that sort of just slowly saps the life out of your legs as you're climbing up. And you have to pick your way and find your line up through the boulders and through the foliage. And I think probably in the summer, once the plant life has grown back, it would be much more challenging to take this route because it would be much more difficult to pick your way through. Now, in this case, there was a dusting of snow over everything, but that made it kind of easy to navigate because the snow didn't settle on the granite rocks, which probably had retained some heat, but it did settle immediately on the spaces in between the rocks and the plants. And so just a matter of picking your way and following the snow line up. Now that did mean that if there were any animal tracks, which I found on the way back, those were kind of obscured. So there wasn't really an easy way to follow animal tracks up the gully. But I picked my way, and it was a climb, and it sort of was the type of climb that starts out steep and then rends up really steep. And it was just a head-down slog. Now the challenge was as you got closer to the top, the wind became stronger, and you could see the clouds zooming overhead, touching and kissing the ridgeline, and then the wind sort of dropping off back onto the east side, straight down at you. And quite close to the top, the wind was swirling and whipping up the snow into these sort of short-lived mini snow tornadoes, more like a dusty devil, but with snow. And it was kind of entertaining to watch, but did sort of bode poorly on what conditions were going to be like on the ridgeline. Now, eventually, after a good hour of climbing, I made the ridge. And immediately the wind was roaring. It was white out. You couldn't see more than 50 feet. You couldn't see the valleys below. I found a bit of a sheltered spot behind a little outcropping and took a moment to try and figure out how I was going to navigate. And so to the south of me was Cold Peak. Wasn't too far away, maybe half a mile. But I couldn't see it. I couldn't see the ridgeline. I couldn't see Cold Peak. I could see a cairn a little bit in front of me. But no idea what lay beyond in the whiteness. I hadn't been up here before. I didn't know what to anticipate. There could be sharp drop-offs on either side. There could be a lot of up and down. I just didn't know. And then I looked to the north toward Peterson Mountain, which was about two miles from this point. Same thing. Complete whiteout. Couldn't see the ridgeline. I had no idea what to expect or what to anticipate by going along that ridge. So I studied the contour lines and it looked like there wasn't a great deal of fluctuation on the on the ridge line. It dropped in places down to 7,400, 7300. And then of course it peaked out at 7800. So there was never going to be any more than three to five hundred feet of elevation gain. It looked like the ridge was pretty wide. I didn't see anything on the map that was particularly alarming. There were certainly some places where it dropped off much more steeply than others, but no big sheer drops that I could see. So the wind was certainly cold, and I decided the best course of action was to go over to Cold Peak because it was closer. And it would give me an idea of the nature of the ridge line somewhat. And if I decided it was too much, too dangerous, too cold, then I had only traveled half a mile or so to Cold Peak and could make a quick descent. And I'd seen Cold Peak a little bit from the bottom of the valley and could see that there was no big drop-offs. If I needed a drop-off quick, not a big problem. I could just come straight off the mountain. And so I started traversing south and the entire way, complete white out. I got to the first cairn. Wasn't much to climb over, it wasn't much of anything, and continued to navigate and start to see the next cairn, but that was all I could see. And after two or three of these, I thought I'd made the summit. Like this is the big one. I must have made it. This is it. It was not. And I've I waited to see if this the GPS was playing up, but it wasn't. I hadn't made it. And so continued along the ridge, sort of picking through maybe five or six different cairns that I repeatedly thought were the summit. And they were not. And eventually there was more of a significant incline, maybe at a hundred feet or so, that took you took me up to Cold Peak. And it wasn't very challenging to get up, just a bit of a slog up the hill. And then you get to the top. And white. That's all I saw. Apparently, on a clear day, you get some wonderful views of the Sierra Nevadas and The lake range. That wasn't to be today. And I did see the USG mark for Cold Peak and filled in a register. Register box was there. Somebody put a relatively new register box there. And it made it fairly quickly. And took a moment just to try and see if the clouds would break and I could get a cap a capture of the valley below. Now the sun has come up from the east. It's not really breaking through. It's kind of making the clouds behind me bright, but I can't see the sun. And it's still very cold and very windy. And in front of me, I'm looking straight down into the valley onto the 395 highway. And actually straight basically at the California state line, looking over into the Sierra Nevadas. Although I I can't see them, but I know it's there and it's below me. And then I decided to take a quick photo and see if I could just capture maybe a little gap in the wind. I didn't really see a gap in the wind. But all of a sudden, this circular rainbow appears in the clouds just below the base of the peak. So the sun is behind me, and I'm looking down into the valley, and the clouds are rushing up towards me. And it must have just hit at the right moment where the clouds are circulating around, the sun is refracting through the water, and you get this circular vision of a rainbow. Now it wasn't a huge, giant rainbow, it was relatively compact in size. I have no concept of how big it was because of the whiteness of the cloud and there really being no landmarks below. But it's an amazing photo of this sort of compact halo effect in the clouds looking down. I have never seen before. It was absolutely amazing. That made my day. But it was cold and it was windy, and I had to get off the peak. So I packed up, got off the peak, and started to head back along the ridgeline. Trying to stay actually off to the east to get out of the wind, to get on the on the lee side of the mountain, just to stay out of that blasting wind. Didn't always achieve it, and quite often I was pushing against the wind. And eventually I made my way back to where I had reached the ridgeline above Mud Spring. And I decided that it wasn't too bad, it wasn't too far. As I suspected, the ridgeline wasn't too aggressive, and decided to make an attempt at the Peterson Mountain High Point, which is the main summit. Now it was about two miles away, and so it was a lot more of a distance traveled, and greater opportunities to get very, very lost very, very quickly in whiteout. And there were certainly some things I was concerned about, sort of ridging out, taking a side ridge and it just coming out into an outcropping that I couldn't see on the map, causing me to need to double back, getting myself into some canyon or valley that led off to the west side on the opposite side of the mountain, which would mean I'd have to come all the way back up again. So I was very cognizant that I wanted to stay high and was constantly checking my map. So started heading north towards Peterson Mountain. And I went through a couple of outcrops and was trying to make sure I was hugging the east side of the mountain to make sure that I didn't accidentally get lost into some gully and end up on the west side. And I opened up into a nice big open grassy plain, but I couldn't really tell where the edge of the ridge was, if I was getting myself caught out on a side spur, where the other ridges were in the clouds. Once in a while I would see the shadow of a ridge in the distance, and I was trying to figure out if that was Peterson Mountain or not, but it didn't look often like it was close enough, or far enough, should I say. And I was trying to figure out where that lay on the contours of the map. And so I kept going and heading through uh the whiteness, and then all of a sudden these grouse shot up from the grass in front of me and scared the bejesus out of me a little bit. And I just remember thinking that I cannot see the mountain in front of me. I know it's here, I just don't know how to get there, and I don't want to lose any elevation and have to climb back up. But I could see on the map, there was a place on the map where you would lose four or five hundred feet of elevation into some sort of valley. And I was trying to see if there was a way that I could avoid doing that, and I just couldn't see it. But I did try it anyway. So I got to a point where I could see that the elevation was dropping off to the east. And so I got on a little bit of a ridge with some outcroppings and tried to maintain the elevation, but wasn't really able to, and ended up dropping into a little valley. And when you get into this valley or more of a saddle, somebody has thoughtfully put a barbed wire fence right the way across the valley in your way. Probably for some reason, like they think they own it, but it was a little bit inconvenient. So I got up to the barbed wire fence line, and now you're in sort of a saddle between two ridges, and so the wind's died down. It the visibility is still a little poor, but you're out of that blasting cold wind. So I followed the barbed wire fence to the west, thinking that was sort of the direction I needed to go, and found a place where it had been beaten up a little bit, and so used that as an opportunity to step over the barbed wire fence. Uh stepped over the barbed wire fence and then looked a couple of hundred yards up the side of the uh gully, and the fence stopped. So I didn't need to climb over it. But uh, if you do come to that barbed wire fence, do head west, and you can just go around it, you don't have to crawl underneath it. Anyway, so now the valley becomes a little bit more substantial, and you are definitely between two ridges. And I think this is the walk the regular way that people come come up the valley. And you were gonna lose elevation, there was no doubt about it, so I just bit the bullet, dropped into the valley, and just started following it down, knowing that there would be another climb to come. The visibility was still very short. I still couldn't see Peterson Mountain. You would think it was the tallest mountain, it would be there invisible, but because of the clouds and the wideout, I couldn't see anything. Anyway, you come down uh into this sort of saddle where a gully drops off sharply to the west, and this is the start of another spring. I I can't recall the name of it, but there's a uh little patch of aspens in the bottom of this gully. And it was really sort of a nice thing to see, sort of said, Hey, you're in alpine territory and nobody's around, there's no people, there's the occasional bird, you are totally isolated. And at this point, there's sort of a junction. I went to the west of the aspens because I'd sort of cut across uh the saddle and a ridgeline. I think what other people do is they follow that valley, it kind of curves around and comes back behind the aspens. I took a bit of a shortcut, I guess, willing to sacrifice some elevation gain, thinking that I was going to be saving myself something that I never did. And then I took a moment to navigate and figure out where Peterson Mountain was. And you go straight across the spring, you start heading up, and you should find a an old jeep track. It's a little bit overgrown, but I mean not substantially. And by overgrown, I mean there's some grass growing on it. Nobody's driven up it in a long time, but it's fairly well defined, and the valley here is sort of isolated and protected, and suddenly the wind has completely died down, it's warming up, and the birds are singing, and you can sort of see the silhouette of mountains through the clouds, and it just feels like a warm, safe place where you would want to camp potentially, even at this altitude. And so it follows the Jeep Road up to a point where obviously hung sharply right, and I thought this was wrong, and this wasn't the direction. But I think if you follow the Jeep Road, it will take you to Peterson Mountain. Instead, what I did was I hung left off trail between this little saddle, between these two little outcrops, thinking I was taking a more direct line, and sort of started going uphill again, a little bit more steeply, a little bit more off trail, and popped up over the top of this ridge, only to discover I was in a bit of a gnarly territory where I had to navigate and side hill down the ridge. And thinking I was on Peterson Mountain, I kept my elevation so I could sum it and then realize that I was not on Peterson Mountain and had a little bit way to go and had to drop off the ridge I was on. It wasn't too bad, but it was kind of taxing on the legs to try and navigate off trail through the rocks and caught up with the base of Peterson Mountain High Point. And then Peterson Mountain itself felt a little bit different to the rest of the ridge I'd been on. This was the boulders here were much bit larger, they were much more consolidated. Further along the ridge, they're much more cracked and divided and splintered, but here very consolidated, big round boulders, but not particularly steep, getting up Peterson Mountain. Quite easy to navigate through these big boulders, and the the ground is a little bit sandier, and cloud is still in, so I still can't see the peak, but I can see as I get closer and closer, it's becoming more and more visible. And eventually you reach this, I'm gonna say unsubstantial summit block that really didn't take anything to get to the top of. And I found a register, could not find the geological marker, but signed the register and found a little rock to hide behind. It was still chilly, the wind was still whipping up there, and took a moment to eat a sandwich I picked up at a gas station, rehydrate, and try and see if the view would lighten up. It was getting a little bit late. I think we're about three hours into the hike at this point, and decided it wasn't going to, so just lay down in the dirt, sort of sheltered, enjoying a sandwich, and finished, packed up, stood up, and the world opened up. The clouds started to dissipate. You could see the valley floor below you, you could see the great basin behind you. And finally, the cloud had lifted high enough that it wasn't whipping across the ridgeline, and it was suddenly much easier to see the landscape around me. And it was a beautiful landscape, a beautiful ridgeline. If you're local Torino and you have driven up the 395 and north up into California, you'll see the Petersons on your right. And they look, as I said at the beginning, insubstantial. But when you come up on the east side and you're up on that ridgeline, it's amazing. It's a beautiful place, especially when you can see it, when the clouds have dissipated. There's these really jagged-looking ridgelines that form these little valleys, and it just looks amazing when you're up there, and you feel completely isolated and alone. It's a wonderful place. And the ground isn't particularly difficult or challenging to navigate through. It's a little soft and sandy and loamy, but it's not rocky and gnarly like tall peak is. And once you're up on the ridge, there's nothing particularly dangerous. There's not really any big drop-offs, just these nice little ridges that run along the spine. And so came back off the mountain quite quickly. Now I can see, I can see where everything is, I can see where I've come and uh made better navigational choices on the way back. Let's sort of put it that that way. I started to be able to see where the animal tracks were, so I was able to better follow the contours. I could see how the valley is wrapped around the ridges, so I could make better navigational decisions. Now, there was one final peak that was missing, and that was the Patterson Mountain, Peterson Mountain South Summit. And this wasn't on the map. I'd seen it, I think, on Peat Bagger a couple of days before, but it wasn't on Gaia. It wasn't a named peak that I could see. So on the way back, I went back past the aspens. That was a bit of a slog getting up out of that valley and over the ridge. I figured I would go the way I came. But in hindsight, you can go up to the east of the aspens and follow that valley up. I'm sure it's much a much more pleasant hike than trying to go up the soft loamy soil and take the more direct route. But I slogged it out. And then when you get to the top of that, there's a ridge line. I thought this must be Peterson Mountain South because it's the highest ridge line around between Peterson and where I'd come up onto the ridge or between here and Cold Peak. And I could see it much better now. So I could see it was the tallest one. And I'd almost gone up the mountain on the way back, but I wasn't sure about the drop-off on the other side. So now it was visible and now it could be seen. I decided to take the ridge there on the north side and then traverse it across to the south side. It was fairly easy to get up, no real gnarly rocks, just a bit of a slog on what was becoming increasingly tired legs. But I mean, the wind was still whipping, it was still cold, but I could see. That was the important thing. I see with the landscape and where I was heading. And so got to the ridge and went through a series of uh not challenging, but okay to navigate, different rock outcrops before until I got to the largest one, sort of a big sum, a block of a blocky summit, which was easy, it was obviously the tallest one, and uh sort of laid claim to that one. And then shortly after that, that barbed wire fence had made its way all the way up this ridge, and now there was no way to get across it. And so took my pack off and then sort of did a little army crawl underneath the bottom of the barbed wire fence, and then at that point I decided to get off of the ridge. I'd made the Peterson South Summit and then head back the way I'd come, following the ridge. Now there was a way back down. I think the way back down right there was the traditional Peterson mountain descent, and I knew I was a couple of miles uh south of that, so I didn't want to take that way. I kind of wanted to go the way I came, so I had to go back west, do a little bit of climbing, nothing nothing substantial, maybe 100 feet in total over the course of five, six hundred feet, to hit the ridgeline again and head back to the point where I had descended back into the canyon. And as I'm um coming along the ridge, I see my car, which is like the it's like that feeling, you know, of oh good, I'm not completely lost. I managed to navigate my way back to my car. So now I'm in the safer zone. The way I'd come up was a little bit further along the ridgeline. And I thought now that I could see my car, I could see the mud spring and the canyon, I'll drop off just a little bit higher into the canyon just because I didn't want to keep being battered by the wind along the ridgeline. And so I dropped off probably, I don't know, it was probably the next gully over to get out of that canyon. And so I had headed straight down, and then I thought, oh God, what am I doing? I didn't come this way. I don't know if there are outcrops that are gonna stun my navigation. I didn't think this through, but I was in it. The ground under underfoot, there was no snow. All the snow, if there had been snow, there was snow earlier in the morning, had gone. And you just left this very soft sandy mud that sort of gave way underfoot as you're going down the mountain. So it became a bit of a a tread, a treadmill exercise where you're sort of sinking down the gully back right into the canyon. That was a fairly decent descent. I think it's around a 2,000-foot descent there, and just picking your way uh through the foliage, through the desert thorns and the rocks, and these sort of semi-outcrops, but I could sort of see where I was going, but it was a bit of a leg workout, and it was warming up and it was getting hot as you got got down the mountain, and finally the wind dissipated as you got lower and lower into the canyon. And the canyon itself, when I got there, uh I was a little bit higher up the canyon than when I had left. And so I had a little bit way of a way to go to pick my way through the bottom of the canyon. And I took a little look northwards to see if I'd carried up the canyon, would that have been a good navigational decision? Well, you still have to make it up to the ridgeline, and it got steeper and steeper. I could see that and rockier and rockier. So I think it would have been a bit challenging to follow Mudspring Canyon all the way to top, because I think it just got rockier and more challenging to navigate. Whereas going up the canyon wall, although challenging, was never that sort of loose, rocky stuff, and you're sort of out of that fear factor of the mountain lion's gonna get me or whatever. But here I was back in the canyon with the heat. I had four layers of clothes on. I decided not to stop and take the jacket off, just keep going. It was still relatively cool outside. I was a little bit concerned maybe there would be snakes in the bottom of the canyon, but that was unfounded. I never saw any. Just picking my way back through the canyon, back into the narrow piece. And uh yeah, I'd forgotten on the way through the thing that gave me the the mountain lion hebe jeebies was there was this pink clean spine of some sort of animal that had met its demise in the very narrow part of the canyon, which is what made me think of, oh well, this something got eaten in here, and what eats things? Well, mountain lions eat things. May not have been a mountain lion, but certainly that set me off and eventually popped back out the bottom of the canyon, very short trip to my car, and just spent, exhausted. My legs were tired after coming down through that soft, loamy stuff, and I felt like I had a day. I felt like this wasn't the day I set out to have. I thought the day I set out to have was a relatively short hour and a half to the top, hour back. I was out on the mountain for five and a half hours. I hadn't just gone up to Peterson and come back down again. I'd done this very challenging side canyon hike up to the ridgeline, got out and got cold peak to the south, then double back on myself, out to Peterson through a wideout, then up the ridgeline to take Peterson Mountain south before descending back the way I came. And it was it was a day. It was cold, it was windy, there were lots of navigational challenges, but it really made for a good, I don't want to say training hike because it was, I mean it sucked, it sucked it out of me. I certainly felt like I had a day, but it was a good training experience for uh some hikes I got coming up in Europe where I'm anticipating the fog and navigation could be could be a challenge. And so it was good to be able to get some confidence in being able to map breed and navigate in white out conditions. But so just wanted to say Peterson Mountain, if you go do that one, you take the the regular route, it's probably high end or moderate. If you make your own plans and the weather isn't playing ball and you're in white out conditions and it's snowing at the base, and you decide to go off trail and do two or three other peaks, then suddenly it becomes a lot harder of a day. And this is true of any mountain that you you climb. Any mountain can turn itself into a difficult hike if you make difficult decisions or the weather closes in, or you try to decide to string together a bunch of peaks. So Peterson Mountain in the end, elevation 7,854 feet, prominence 2,500 feet. Traditionally, more of a five to six mile walk. Uh elevation gain, a little over 2,000. Nothing particularly challenging in terms of the route itself, unless you go off trail like I did, or you get lost in a way out and find yourself on ridgelines. Uh visibility definitely paid a factor. Cold peak, 7,804 feet in elevation, only a couple of hundred feet in prominence. It's a fair distance from Peterson, a couple of miles from Peterson along the ridge. A little bit of a blocky rock. When I got there, nice and flat, but very strong wind. Couldn't see anything. Very cold, a cold peak, uh, not surprisingly. Then on the way back, hit Peterson south along a separate sort of ridge line overlooking the East Valley. Total elevation, 7,811 feet. Prominence, maybe 300, 400 feet, about a mile, mile and a half from the main Peterson uh ridge. Lots of volcanic blocks, a little bit loose, some class two stuff. Weather cleared up, but the wind was still howling across. But really a great three peak day, turning a moderate day into a hard day. Now off you pop.