Mount Perkins 5456′
Total Time: ~2:00
Distance: 3.5 miles
Elevation Gain: 1200′
Crux: Class 1-2
Trailhead: Jeep roads to the north, 4WD, no services
The third and final day of my AZ P2K weekend was a double header of Mount Perkins and Hualapai Peak, summits 5 and 6 for the weekend. Mount Perkins was by far the shortest hike of the 6 summits (Peacock Peak, Mount Tipton, Mount Wilson, Grand Wash Cliffs and Hualapai), and with a sturdy vehicle you can drive all the way to the summit ridgeline with some easy cross country to the top. Following dinner after a succesful summit of Grand Wash Cliffs, I drove back to US 93 and opened a primitive wire gate to turn on to the El Dorado Powerline Road. I followed this decent road for a few miles and hooked left into the mountains. The road became progressively rougher as I went in, and I ignored the various mining roads and random branch points. By now it was completely dark, and I nearly lost the road several times as it entered big washes, sometimes traveling 50′ or so before turning back out, easy to mess up in the dark. The road narrowed and the canyon tightened at 4400′ just before the final switchbacks to the summit. I pushed through a rough high clearance section, then was faced with huge rock steps blocking further progress. The road at this point was at the bottom of the drainage, and these steps were no doubt getting larger with each passing rain from high run off. There was no way my stock vehicle was getting any further, and I carefully turned the car around and parked at a small pull off and went to sleep. I again woke with the sunrise and after a little caffeine, started up the remainder of the road to the ridgeline.
There were huge rock steps in more than a few places, and I wondered when the last time a stock car was able to make it up, with a number of trip reports from prior years making no mention of them. The road ends at a small series of towers less than a mile northwest along the ridgeline of the high point, and I reached the ridge after about 15 minutes of hiking. I was impressed by the views of lake Mohave to the southwest and across to Spirit Mountain at the southern tip of Nevada.
I had this view to enjoy the entire ridgeline traverse over to the summit of Mount Perkins, with a few small false summits en route, all easy to avoid and traverse around, with nothing more than high grasses on the windy, scarce ridgeline.
Another set of antennae adorned the summit of Perkins, and I walked past them to find the benchmark and summit register built into a large cairn. I recognized a number of names in the register, although it seemed like a good chunk of the signatures were the workers up to work on the towers.
My final objective for the weekend, Hualapai Peak, was clear to the south, and I headed down in order to maximize my time for the highest summit of the weekend. Nearing the set of towers to the northwest, I cut downslope to meet the road lower down, shaving off a quarter mile with easy and open cross country. Once at the road, it took only a few minutes to reach my car, and slowly worked my way down the rough road and back to the highway to bag peak #6 of 6.
