Comanche Point and Espejo Butte

Comanche Point 7073′ and Espejo Butte 6240′
Grand Canyon National Park
Total Time: 11:45
Elevation Gain: 5700′
Distance: 19.7 miles
Crux: Class 3
Trailhead: Cedar Mountain Road, no services

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I was starting to run low on South Rim peaks I could do without a partner. Taking out summits on Havasupai Land that were a bit difficult to access legally, I only had 4 left that were class 3 or less- Comanche Point, Espejo Butte, Pattie Butte and Whites Butte. With the first big winter storm expected the following week, I wanted to take advantage of what might be the last chance to bag something just off the rim for a while. I wanted to try for Comanche Point and Espejo Butte in one long day, which I figured would be somewhere around 20 miles from Cedar Mountain Road. There is a Navajo Road near Gold Hill that would put me much closer to the peak, but I had heard the road is rough and can take 3 hours to drive the 20ish miles each way. And with a morning start in Phoenix that would already require hours of driving to begin the day, I cut my losses, drove into the park and turned down Cedar Mountain Road. I made it maybe half a mile down the road just before the start of the switchbacks before hitting some deeper ruts where I pulled off to start hiking. The last time I had been on this road had been to climb Cedar Mountain, which loomed straight ahead as I started down the switchbacks.

With a long day ahead I cut the road using deer trails, bringing me to where I would have parked my car had I been willing to drive further in only about 20 minutes, my parking spot higher up the road not really wasting much time. I wanted to hit Comanche Point first, in part because I had a copper register from Art Christensen that would lighten my load to drop off. From the descent, I thought I could pick out which point on the rim was Comanche and it looked surprisingly close. So rather than swing wide east on Point Solitude Road, I cut cross country almost immediately, finding the travel quite easy in the wide open grassy plateau dotted with trees and small cacti.

I initially was pleased with this decision to cut cross country- the small rims and drainages that split the rolling grassy hills weren’t deep and easy to drop down and cross. But each drainage got steeper and deeper with Comanche Point looking just as far from the start. When I was halfway there, I began to encounter small cliff bands, nothing too difficult to work through but definitely slowing me down considerably.

I decided to try and cheat closer to the rim hoping the ravines would be less deep, but only found more bands of rock for my trouble. It took me a few more false summits before reaching the final deep notch between Comanche and the rest of the rim, several hundred feet of steep descent just to head back up.

The lower slopes of the summit had some of the trickiest class 3 of the day- but again, nothing too challenging. I slogged up the final few hundred feet of cross country to the high point along the rim, reaching it at about 12:30. What would normally be a fantastic views was completely obscured by thick smoke from the Ikes Fire that had settled into the canyon, the north rim barely visible.

The point had some cairns (adorned with random elk bones) but no register, and I left a copper Art Christiansen register, the last of the 6 I had picked up from him. I could see Espejo Butte from Comanche, and still hoped to tag that after. It wasn’t far off the rim, but required a traverse of several prominent bumps along the way and a lot more up and down to get there. Growing tired of going in and out of ravines and gullies, I was hoping to drop down to reach the road to Cape Solitude to minimize the cross country I had endured thus far and cut up to Espejo from there. So rather than try and traverse the rim, I dropped off to the east into the broad drainage below, finding a fantastic game trail as well as a startling number of nearly intact elk skeleton en route.

After about a mile of descent I reached a broad grassy basin only a quarter mile from the the old road to Cape Solitude. At this point I only had a little over 3 hours of daylight left, and I had heard from Art that the route finding on Espejo is a bit tricky. But the excellent elk trail I picked up seemed to head directly north towards Espejo Butte. I figured if I could make the rim overlooking the butte in an hour, which my GPS had at 1.5 miles away, that would give me 1 hour to scramble down to the summit and another to get back to the rim before dark. I decided to go for it, not wanting to hike out again this far from Desert Tower with Espejo being so close on this trip. Heading north over a shallow saddle, the excellent game trail continued through the grasses, passing by a small Native American ruin in a ravine. I left the game trail once I was directly east of the butte and headed up slope to the rim, reaching it in under an hour from the grassy basin. I was pleased with how close Espejo looked from the rim, and was confident I could make it back by sunset.

I had Art’s beta in my pocket, which described dropping down the chute to the north and bypassing a chokestone in one of the first gullies. I found the described chokestone and scrambled around it easily enough dropping down to the next shelf.

Here’s where the routefinding got a little trickier, with a series of parallel gullies and no good way to see down them without descending first. Art’s description described another chokestone which I eventually found and face climbed down next to (left side if facing downslope), although I admit I think I would have dismissed the cliff-y looking gully from above without Art’s beta.

Things got a little easier from there, with a descending traverse over and around a series of rock ribs to reach the notch between the rim and Espejo.

I wasted no time starting up the ridge, trying to keep to the spine as much as possible to keep things interesting. Scrambling up the huge solid sandstone boulders, I thought it was one of the best rock scrambles I’ve had in recent memory, although that could of been the hours of breathing smoke from the Ikes Fire playing tricks on me…. I hit the summit on schedule, with about an hour before sunset and fantastic low western light bathing the canyon, much of the smoke having blown out from some afternoon winds.

The register went back to 2002, mine being the 5th entry since then, half solo adventurers and the other half two-somes. With at least 8 miles between me and my car and the sun dropping fast, I scrambled down the ridge, again staying true to the crest as much as possible before retracing my steps back up the rim.

I went up an incorrect chute near the top that led me to make an exposed move around a different chokestone higher up, but aside from that it was straightforward route finding and climbing back to the rim.

Trying to take advantage of what little light remained, I dropped off the rim back to the game trail, needing my headlamp just before reaching it. The game trail was a little harder to follow in the dark, but I would usually refind it just as quickly as I lost it. I got back to the grassy basin in under an hour. The Cape Solitude Trail was less than a quarter mile to the east, but I had noticed earlier that the elk trail continued fairly straight south from the basin, and thought I might try my luck with it rather than bushwacking to the road. The use trail headed up a ridge that paralleled the road to the west, and I lost it when the grassy fizzled out. But cross country was easy on the ridgeline and I followed it over a mile until it hit the road directly. I think that ridge would probably be the most direct and least painful way to climb either Comanche Point and Espejo Butte rather than the cross country BS I did on the way in. I followed the old road/ Cape Solitude trail in the dark all the way back to Cedar Mountain Road. As I climbed the final switchbacks to the car, a shooting star dropped from the sky directly into the canyon, a pretty cool finish to a long day. I hopped in the car and drove to Tusaysan for a late dinner, then passed out off one of the forest roads outside of town.

The following day I made an attempt on Pattie Butte from Yaki Point, but the bushwacking took longer than I expected and I turned around early realizing I would miss the shuttle at the rate I was going. I’ll plan on taking the more direct route off Shoshone Point when it’s time to retry that one…