Story Pop: Sweet, Sweet Chocolate Peak, NV

Chocolate Peak sits above Reno like a quiet dare — a short, steep, heat‑exposed ridge that looks like a warm‑up but climbs like a test piece. In this Story Pop episode, we head up the Jones Creek side to see what this unassuming Nevada peak has to say when the grade kicks up, the footing turns to ball‑bearing granite, and the sun starts to lean on you.

This is a day built on honesty. A direct line up a decomposed‑granite ridge that gets hotter, steeper, and more exposed the higher you go. The modern identity of this mountain is as Reno’s unofficial fitness check.

If you’ve ever wondered how a small peak can punch above its weight — or why some climbs feel more like a conversation with yourself than a route — this episode is your companion on the ridge.

Off you pop.

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 Story Pop, where the mountain is in a checklist, it's a character. Today we're heading into the foothills above Reno, to a peak that doesn't look like much from the highway, but hits harder than anyone expects. Chocolate Peak. A short, steep, heat-exposed grinder rising above Jones Creek and hidden in the shadows of Mount Rose. A nine mile, 3300 foot ascent that feels like a training run until it doesn't. Chocolate Peak is a mountain built out of loose granite, sun, and honesty. It's the kind of climb that gives you nothing for three, no shade, just switchbacks, and a direct line up a ridge that gets hotter, steeper, more exposed the higher you go. This isn't a famous summit, it's a locals peak that most people ignore. Good for short hikes and trail runners. And when you get to the peak, there's no sign, no summit block, no curated moment, just a ridge, a view, and a climb that tells you exactly where your fitness and your mindset are on that particular day. But that's why it matters. Because some mountains test your skills, some test your endurance, and some, like Chocolate Peak, test your willingness to keep moving when the sun is in your face and the trail is nothing but loose rock and a stubborn grade. This isn't a pop, this isn't a guide. This is a story about a Reno Backyard Peak that punches above its weight, and the day I went up there to see what I had in the tank, this is Story Pop. This is Chocolate Peak, and this is Off You Pop. So let's get into it. Starting with the Blister Pop difficulty scale for Chocolate Peak via Jones Creek. The distance is 9 miles, and you'll gain 3300 feet in elevation until you reach the peak at 9,409 feet. It should take about 3.5 to 4.5 hours. It's mostly class 1 with a little bit of class 2 on the summit. So it ranks 52 on the difficulty scale, and we're going to break that down for you. The physical difficulty is 22 out of 30. It's a steady, unrelenting climb with almost no flat sections. The Jones Creek Trail approach stacks gain early, and then you go off trail and hit a long, hot, exposed ridge. The vert per mile is real. It's a legitimate hard physical day for Reno standards. It's a 22 because of the gain, and because there are no technical rests, and because of the sustained grade. On the environmental difficulty it scores 12 out of 20, and this is where it's really punching above its weight. There's full sun exposure. When you're down in the valley, the high desert heat is real, and you can get wind on the ridge. On a hot day, this becomes a heat management challenge. On the technical difficulty, it scores six out of twenty. Most of the route is on trail, class one or two. There's some sections of loose decomposed granite when you hit the ridgeline, and a few very short class two moves near the summit, and there's some minor route finding on the ridge. Nothing sustained, nothing exposed, nothing that requires hands. It's not technical, but the loose footing adds a little bit of spice. From the logistical difficulty, we scored it five out of fifteen. It's very straightforward. The trailhead access is very easy. You don't need any permits, and there's almost no navigational complexity. It's simple, but the heat can add up to the logistical load. On the psychological difficulties scale, it scores seven out of fifteen. Chocolate Peak has a long exposed ridge with no shade, and there's really no bailout once you commit to the upper ridge. It's a grind mentality, similar to other local training peaks. It's not scary, but it can be mentally taxing in the heat. It's mostly a grind, not a fear-based challenge. So overall we scored it 52 out of 100, which puts it in the very low hard scale. And sitting in the shadow of Mount Rose at 10,798 feet, it's actually slightly more difficult. Mount Rose is typically taken from the Mount Rose trailhead at 8,600 feet and is almost all trail all the way, so it's actually scores a little bit lower, 46 out of 100. This adds to the difficulty scale just because there's a big section that's sort of off trail and there's no real rest. On the Mount Rose Trail, you're going to find a long section of about two miles to the Gleena waterfall that is fairly flat, and so it's a lot less intimidating. So Chocolate Peak is a legit Reno hard. It's not a Reno classic, it's not known nationally, but it's absolutely worthy of being a training peak for bigger objectives. Why is it called Chocolate Peak? There's no official reason, but it really comes down to the dark brown volcanic cap at the top and the brown striped ridges that are visible from Reno. So it looks like it's made of chocolate, sort of. I didn't try tasting the rock, but you can see where it gets its name. Now let's get on the pop. So this day I went on a Saturday morning fairly early. I was there around 5 30 at the trailhead. It's about a 15-minute drive from the south of Reno. And to get there, you go to the Galena State Park off the Mount Rose Highway. And once you're in the park, the Jones Creek Trailhead is well signposted, and there's a large open parking lot. I had decided to take on this challenge attempting to do Mount Rose the hard way. As I mentioned before, most people attempt Mount Rose from the Mount Rose Trailhead, much further up the mountain at about 8,600 feet. There is another way, and this is the way. The way to make it difficult is to start down close to the city at 6,200 feet at the Jones Creek Trailhead. And if you do that, you're looking at a 5 to 6 mile hike with 4,800 to 5,000 feet of gain. Now on this day, I could see there's still a fair amount of snow at the top of the peak, but I thought I'd give it a go and see if I could make it all the way to the top. Now, as it turns out, spoiler alert, I did not make it all the way to the top, mostly because the snow looked like it was too difficult to pass, and so I gave it a little bit of a side hustle and went over to Chocolate Peak instead, which was absolutely a worthy goal as well for the day. And it's fairly common for people to go to Chocolate Peak this this time during the shoulder season. And I was here because I'm three weeks away from taking on the UK Six Peaks Challenge, and I've spent the last week recovering from some planar fasciitis, and it seemed like it had gone away, and I wanted to make sure I still had my mountain lungs underneath me and that my feet really had recovered. And a grind of 4800 or even 3300 as today turned out to be, seemed like a good last training push before I took on the highest peaks in the British Isles. So I got got my stuff together and started up the trailhead. Now there's been a fair amount of fire damage in this particular state park due to the Davis fire about two years ago, and it's fairly visible just around the trailhead. But as you get up into the trail, the fire didn't make it that far. So the rest of the trail is classic Sierra Nevada alpine environment. So it fet starts out fairly flat, you get through the Glean Estate Park and you reach the Jones Creek itself. At this time of the year it was a fairly general stream. They're putting sort of these sticks across that made a makeshift bridge, and so it was fairly easy to get across that. But then as soon as you head up towards Church's Pond and up the Jones Creek Trail, the ascent begins. And it's continuous, it does not let up. It starts out looking fairly benign, but soon you realize you're ascending. And it was a good early test for my calf muscles and my lungs as I began climbing up on the west side of Jones Creek, slowly ascending. Each time there's a little bit of a rise, you feel it, and I felt like I had to stop quite often. And I I put this down to just being out of commission for a week. But it was a beautiful day, and you're walking through this beautiful alpine forest with Jeffrey Pines on either side of you, and you begin to ascend, and then you start hitting these switchbacks, which are actually a bit of a welcome from the straight-up initial gain, and the switchbacks continue, and you start to climb out of the Jones Creek little canyon until eventually you pop up onto a ridge and the world opens up. You can see across the canyon in the distance is Slide Mountain, which is a popular ski area, the Mount Rose ski area, and then you just start to see Chocolate Peak and little glimpses of Mount Rose off in the distance. But now you're out of the cover and the shadow of the trees, and even this early in the morning, there's about two and a half miles in, about a about 7,000 feet up, it began to get pretty warm already. It was gonna be a warm day in the 80s, but at the start of the trail, my hands are a little cold, and but as soon as you pop out of the forest, the heat starts coming on. And so as you reach the top of the switchbacks, you come out on this little ridge, and you can turn right and do a loop. You can do the Jones Creek Trailhead Loop, which will take you along the ridge and then back down to the parking lot. Or there's a little spur, there's no signpost there, but there's a spur that takes you to Church's Pond. And so that's the way you want to go if you're heading up to Eva Mount Rose, or as I did on this day up to Chocolate Peak. And so it flattens out a little bit, and there's a little bit of slight gray downhill, but you're definitely heading up towards the mountains. And as I'm hiking along, suddenly a family comes back down the trail towards me. And so I said, Oh, did you make it to the top? And they went, Yeah, yeah, we made it to the top. So I said, Oh, Mount Rose, the snow is clear. And they said, No, no, no, we we didn't make it to Mount Rose, we made it to the to the pond. And so uh they must have left maybe half an hour or so before I did in the morning, and there was you know, mum and dad and a couple of kids trotting back down the mountain, and they seemed to be having an enjoyable day, but they did not make it to the top of any peak, just to just to the end of the of the spur here. And slowly you start coming into some aspens, and you start feeling like you're really in the mountains. And there was nobody else apart from this family that were heading back down the mountain, and you come into this clearing, and there's Church's Pond. It's almost like a triangular-shaped pond that's at the bottom of the valleys that lead all the way up to Mount Rose. You can see Mount Rose there intimidating in the distance, way above you, and there's at least another two and a half thousand feet from this point to get up to Mount Rose. But I had the pond to myself, and I just stopped for a minute to enjoy it, and then figured out how I needed to start ascending. And so you go a little to the north of the pond, there's a trail, and you start the ascent into the mountain itself, and there's a very thick thicket of aspens that are streaking down the mountainside, and you head towards those, and when you get into them, the trail becomes very steep immediately, and you are suddenly enclosed in aspens, and you have to sort of wiggle your way through the mountains, but the trail is the trail is definitely there. You're just picking your way through these little aspens. It's pretty steep, it's steep because you're getting up onto a ridgeline, and as you poke out of the aspens, suddenly you're back into Alpine, it opens up a little, and there's these Jeffrey Pines on either side, and that's when I hit the first snow. There wasn't a significant amount of snow, there was just a fairly broad, actually fairly solid patch of snow that had crossed across the trail, and I got a little bit confused at this point. I couldn't quite see which way the trail went, but I saw some footprints. Somebody had been up here maybe the day before and had taken the snowbank hard north into what seemed like a path, and the path led into like a small pine and then some mountain mahogany. I thought, oh, that must be the way. As I started over the ridge, it was apparent that the trail, not a trail, was going into a dense patch of mountain mahogany and back down, sort of over the other side of the ridge, into this valley. And as I looked across the mountain mahogany, across the valley, I thought I saw where the trail was picking up on the other side of the valley. So I thought maybe this was the way, it had just become pretty overgrown. Maybe the mountain mahogany had been crushed by the winter's snow and was covering the trail. So I started down into this other valley on the other side of the ridge, and I couldn't see the trail, and I quickly became lost. But as I'm coming back down into this other valley, it's pretty steep, and I've gotten myself into the mountain mahogany, and it's like tearing at me a little. I'm trying to figure out where this trail, not a trail, is, and it was just bushwhacking. And I'd gotten maybe a hundred yards down the other side of the ridge and decided I was in it. I wasn't gonna go back. I was just gonna keep hacking through the mountain mahogany. I had lost the trail, but I'm sure it was here and this was the way, but it was sort of tearing at me a little bit, and it was a little bit challenging to try and navigate through, but then suddenly I popped out of the thicket and I was a little bit lower down the mountain. I turned around and looked behind me, and there's just this wall of mountain mahogany, and below me is a valley, I can hear this rushing creek coming down the valley, and then as I look up, I can see the way up to Mount Rose. It's very imposing when you're down in this valley and then looking straight up into it, and there's a fair amount of snow in this valley, and I'm trying to figure out how to navigate up here. I'm now off trail, and I realized that I probably should stop and check where I was, and so I got my phone out and I checked. Actually, I checked all trails on this day because I downloaded the trail from from all trails, and I could see I was below where the trail ran. There was a trail that was probably about 100 meters above me, and I decided I was gonna side hill back up the valley to to the pass to the trail, and so this became a bit taxing. There was a fair amount of sagebrush and loose rock, but I picked my way back up to the trailhead and rejoined it maybe a hundred yards from where I'd originally fallen off and a little bit dejected. And as I check the map again, I can see that Chocolate Peak is actually above me, and there's no snow, and it's a fairly decent climb up to the ridge. I could see I could make the ridge and then just pop along the ridge to get to Chocolate Peak, and then I look up to Mount Rose and see all the snow in that valley, and I decided that it wasn't going to be Mount Rose today, and that my new destination was going to be Chocolate Peak. When we get up on Chocolate Peak, I assumed I'd have some better views of the way up to see if there was a way forward, and so I just decided to slog straight up the mountain. Now, the ground underneath me was really well consolidated. There was some loose stuff, but not really a lot of loose stuff, but it just became a grind, grinding straight up, sort of zigzagging my way all the way up to the ridge. And it was a grind, head-down grind from that from that trail all the way up to the up to the ridge line. And when I got to the initial point or the high point of the ridge that I could see there from Contact Pass, I realized it was a bit of a trek or a traverse over to Chocolate. Not that long, but longer than it looked from the trail, and I made my way over to Chocolate Peak, and when I got to this top, the views were amazing. You could see the valley below you, the great basin stretching out, the sun had sort of come up and was reflecting off the snow. And then as you turned around the other side and look up the mountain, you can see Mount Rose. And I don't know why, it just looks so imposing from this viewpoint. Now I'm at 9,400 feet, and Mount Rose is at 10,700 feet. So it was only another 1,300 feet, but it was a fair distance to get there. My little detour down into the valley and then back slogging up to Chocolate Peak had taken a fair amount of time and a fair amount of distance. I was actually at about four and a half miles at that point. And if I had gone the direct route up at Mount Rose, it was about five and a half miles. But I was a lot further than a mile away. And I could see that the snow was a little unforgiving, particularly on the valley approach. It looked like there was a way once you got up into the big bowl that you could navigate through the snow, but getting there looked like it was going to be a little bit miserable and it and a little bit deep. And so I decided this was it for the day, and I was just going to be heading back down. So once I was at the top of the peak, took a little bit of time, had a little bit of food, signed the register, and lo and behold, in the register, somebody had left some two a tube with some joints in them, some cannabis joints. So I put them back in the box, but it was an interesting find in the register there. And then the descent actually wasn't that bad. Coming back off the mountain, I dropped off the ridge a little bit earlier than I had into this sort of loose, soft scree, and it made for a nice descent back to Contact Pass. Didn't take very long to get back to Contact Pass, and then it was just all go, go, go. It was time to get back off the mountain, and I decided it would be a good opportunity for me to put in a real quick descent, use my poles, save my legs, and really figure out how to get off the mountain really quickly. Not trail running, I had a full pack on, but really moving quickly, little bursts of running, but mostly just a real quick m-march. And so you come across the ridge, you're back into the alpine, and then I saw the little snow patch that had thrown me off somewhat. And lo and behold, there were a couple of trail runners coming up the trail, and they asked me if the snow was clear up to the mountain hut. I had seen the mountain hut, this sort of a silver mountain hut, directly below Chocolate Peak, and on the way, the right way up to Mount Mr. And I told him this was the only patch of snow, and they were they were good to go. I didn't see him again. So you're back into the thicket of the aspens and then back into Church's pond. And there are four or five people at the pond. I guess we've been out three hours. It was 8:39 in the morning, and so people were starting to come out. The locals were coming up up the trail to enjoy the day. And from then on, coming back down the trail, back this back down the switchbacks, people, people, people coming out for the day. See a couple of people were definitely trail runners, slogging out for the run, and then gonna do the rundown. But a lot of just regular hikers up for the day. They were missing the best of it. I'm gonna say it, say that, say it that way. A lot of them, it seemed, would were going to Church's Pond, and that was it. I saw people stopped on the ridge for a little picnic and whatnot, but it was getting real hot, even that early in the morning. The sudden change from being on a nice breezy cool ridge back into the into the desert, effectively, down into the into the jungle. Canyon. It was pretty jarring. It was becoming pretty hot pretty quickly. It may also have been that I was moving pretty quickly. I was fast packing it down with poles, but it was a real good experience to see how quickly I could get off the mountain. And so I was just hammering it down, stopping occasionally to let people pass. I made it down off of Church's peak. My three-hour ascend became like an hour 15 descent, which was pretty good. I was moving somewhere in the region of four to five miles an hour on the way down. And as I'm coming back down to Jones Creek itself, I decided to forego the bridge and just walk through the little creek rather than messing around with the with the bridge. There were some people messing around on the bridge, and I just couldn't be bothered to wait effectively. And then as I'm coming back to the trailhead, one of the casual hikers says to me, Oh, there's a baby bear down at the at the trailhead. And have you seen any other bears? And I I hadn't seen any other bears that day, so I kept going to the trailhead. When I got to the trailhead, no baby bears. Just I guess there are bears in the region. So if you're going to do this one, just be careful that there are some bears around. Now they're black bears. They're not grizzlies, but you know, early in the season, they're hungry bears, they've got babies. Just be careful when you're out there, you know, early spring. Make sure you're not getting in between the bear and its mother. But it was a it was a nice day. It took me about four hours, four hours fifteen. Got nine miles in, 3,330 feet of ascent. It's really a locals shoulder season grind. The number of trail runners on there should let you know what kind of a hike it is. It is a really nice descent coming down the switchbacks and down into Jones Creek if you're a trail runner. And it's really a pleasant hike, I would say. Just a real grind to the top to get to Chocolate Peak, especially if you get lost and end up way down the mountain into a into a valley. That was a nice grind to the top, but I had a real pleasant day, and I'd recommend it to locals more than anything else. If you're coming in from out of town, it's likely you're staying up at Tahoe and you'll do the do the rose trail head instead. But this one's this one's for the locals, and I hope you get out there and enjoy it. Now, off you pop.