Avawatz Peak

Avawatz Peak 6155′
Desert Peak Section
Total Time: 7:20
Distance: 21.9 miles (~6 on E-bike)
Elevation Gain: 5700′
Crux: Class 2
Trailhead: Sheep Springs Road, no services

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It had been over a year since my last little mini-trip to the desert, with three days climbing the DPS summits Spectre Peak, Eagle Mountain and Sheephole Mountains HP around Joshua Tree November of 2024. In 2025 I had only ticked off Glass Mountain, so my return to the desert was long overdue. I had what amounted to a day and a half off to try and tick off a few of the closer ones to home, still a four hour drive away. I hoped to maximize my time with a new weapon- an E-bike I had picked up on Black Friday, hoping to cut down on approach times utilizing old mining roads when I could. I had the idea planted in my head after a discussion with some other climbers during the Sierra Challenge (Chris Kerth?) and this would be my first time testing it out. The bike I picked was a heavy 70 lb Aventon Aventure 3 Fattire, and although I had a bike rack for my car, I wanted to avoid having that hanging off my car while base camping for a few nights at a hotel in Barstow. So, while packing for the short trip, I found that I could just fit the heavy bike in my RAV4 if I removed the handlebars, saving me from dealing with the heavy bike rack.

My first objective was a long one, Avawatz Peak located north of Mojave National Preserve and south of Death Valley National Park. With over 3,000′ of prominence, it was on California’s 50 Finest List, but since a portion of the range falls near the Fort Irwin training grounds, the only legal approach was from the north, a minimum of 16 miles round trip, but realistically closer to 20 with the approach road in rough shape after some recent big winters. This is where I hoped the E-bike would come in handy, getting me past the washed out sections and to the trailhead quickly. So quick in fact, that I hope to have enough time in the afternoon to climb nearby Old Man Mountain in the Mojave Preserve. With that in mind, I left my hotel in Barstow well before dawn, hoping to be starting out on my bike as the sun rose. I left I-15 in Baker, driving in darkness north with the faintest light on the horizon to the east. I turned west onto Saratoga Springs Road, excellent packed sand, then hooked south onto the unmarked Sheep Creek Spring Road. This deteriorated quickly, and recognizing that I could only make it a mile or two before it became impassable to my Rav4, I pulled off, thinking that I could probably bike as fast as I could drive at that point. I parked in a shallow wash and pulled my bike out of the trunk…. and the entire front wheel and stem fell completely off the frame. As pieces scattered into the sand in darkness, I quickly realized that this would not be an easy fix. Cursing loudly in the dark to no one, I did the best I could to try and reassemble my bike by headlamp, but found that I couldn’t seem to get it quite right. After about 30 minutes, I felt I had put it together close enough to a least be rideable, although the front stem still seemed a bit loose in the frame.

There was now enough light to not need a headlamp as I started biking down the road, finding it so rough that I had a hard time moving quickly, needing to hop off and walk it in a few sections. Luckily, the road significantly improved after passing over a series of washes, and my screen showed me clipping along at 8 mph as I quickly reached the trailhead. I was actually able to follow the wash another 0.7 miles to the Wilderness Boundary at Sheep Creek Spring, with some old mining ruins and even a Porta Potty at the edge of the Wilderness.

I locked my bike and started on foot up the wash, utilizing a use trail above the east side of the canyon to get up and over a thicket of brush from the spring before dropping back down. From there, the wash was long and unrelenting. After about an hour of hiking from the Wilderness Boundary, I hit a narrow section with a series of short dry falls, easily bypassed by a cairned ramp on the left. Shortly up-canyon was another narrow section, the walls smoothed from centuries of flash floods carving their way through.

Beyond this narrowing the canyon re-widened considerably and I found myself in full sun for the first time all day. It would be another hour of boring wash hiking before the canyon narrowed a final time, climbing steeply through white choss. This section was mostly class 2 with a few class 3 steps thrown in, although these likely could be easily avoided.

The loosest section was the headwall just below the ridgeline, and I emerged from the long wash at 9:40 AM, the summit in view for the first time all day. I had not recognized on my map that I needed to go up and over an intervening ridgeline coming off the unnamed subpeak to the northeast, requiring a quick descent into an intervening hanging valley before heading up the final push to the summit.

It was another 700′ of elevation gain in a little over half a mile, a faint use trail weaving through the high desert scrub. The trail skirted a false summit to the left, and I was surprised to find the prints of a helicopter skid on the connecting saddle. Sure enough when I reached the summit a few minutes later, I found the register loaded with names of Captains from the nearby military base, and I assumed most of them landed near the summit on training missions. Hard to feel like shaving off some approach road with an E-bike was cheating when you can take a helicopter to the summit! I ate an early lunch on the summit, enjoying the views across Mojave Preserve to the south and Death Valley to the north, with both Telescope Peak and Mount Charleston above Las Vegas dusted in snow. I could barely make out the Sierra to the northwest, Olancha Peak the most obvious with the Langley massif barely in view.

I still held out hopes for a second summit in the afternoon so I started back down the way I came, jogging where I could and climbing back up and over the intervening ridgeline to re-enter the wash. I put on a few climbing podcasts to help the miles go by a bit faster, passing through the carved out narrow a bit over an hour from the summit and getting back to my bike around 1 PM.

After some rough starts and stops through the wash on my bike, I was quickly back on the rough road getting back to my car at 1:40 PM. There was plenty of daylight to attempt Old Man Mountain, so after quickly removing my handlebars in a way that would not cause my bike to further explode, I loaded the bike back into my car and headed south and into the Mojave Preserve for the second summit of the day…