Off The Beaten Path
This peak guide is presented here for the convenience of our visitors.
Neither the Desert Peaks Sections or the Sierra Club guarantees the accuracy of this document. Use at Your Own Risk!
| No. 57 | Soledad Mountain (4,190') | California |
This guide is based on a Sage article by Bob Michael
Topo Map:
Soledad Mountain 7½
Coordinates: Lat 34 58 57 Lon 118 11 15
Trip Stats: unknown
DRIVING
From Lancaster, drive north on Hwy. 14 to Backus Road. Go west on bakus to where you turn off up a promising-looking dirt road almost due south of the summit. Park near here as a wash has cut a gully across the road that was floored with soft sand.
HIKING
It was just over a mile to the southern flank of the peak. The whole mountain is fractured and mineralized rhyolitic volcanics. While the entire mountain has been heavily prospected, the northern side - site of the "Golden Queen Mine" - has really been ripped up in the search for gold; roads to core-drilling sites ascend the north side to a few hundred feet below the summit. The southern side is still pretty wild, and much less dug up; at any rate, access on the north appears doubtful because of all the private mining property. My route cut up a southwestern ridge to the 4082' false southern summit. Between about 3500' and 3700' was a tedious, dicey steep stretch of crumbling volcanic gravel on hardpan dirt that was like walking on steep eggs. Some craggy stuff on the S side of the true summit can be contoured to the south and west.
NOTES
Its name means " solitude" in Spanish, and it's a good name for a peak that rises all by its lonesome southwest of the town of Mojave in the rather flat and uninspiring western end of the Mojave Desert. It's a classic example of the kind of desert land-form geornorphologists call an "inselberg" (German for "island mountain") In fact, this is absolutely the furthest-west desert peak of any consequence; the view from the summit takes in HPS peaks rather than anything on the desert list. A landmark on the Sierra commute, I'm sure all of us have thought of running up it, but it's not on any List, summer is too hot, and it's a long way to South Lake ...
This peak is a long way from anything else I've climbed, and the view was correspondingly different. Probably the closest recognizable peaks are HPS Tehachapi, Double, Cross, and Chuckwalla. To the west, the almost-flat prairie of the Mojave tapered to a point at Gorman between the converging traces of the San Andreas and Garlock Faults. Many of the HPS northern Ventura County peaks were arrayed west of Gorman.