![\"map\"](\"http:\/\/skelmo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/map.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nUnfortunately, our plan did not go as we intended.\u00a0 The trail heads West around Mummy Mountain and up it’s West side to line up for the approach on Charleston.\u00a0 At the first intersection of the trail we went right rather than left.\u00a0 On our way back we took a picture of where we went wrong (below).\u00a0 There is a very visible trail to the right but the North Loop trail actually goes left over the hump.\u00a0 There is a sign, but unfortunately it’s on the ground mixed in with some dead branches.\u00a0 When we saw where we went wrong, we felt better that we weren’t complete idiots, but we won’t make that mistake again.<\/p>\n
The trail we took started climbing steeply up the mountain.\u00a0 We gained about 1000ft in a very short period of time.\u00a0 Once we reached the top, we knew that we were off track but were looking for ways to rejoin the trail without going backwards.\u00a0 We wandered around on the ridge for a while looking for a spot to get down until we found a group of guys that told us how to get to the Mummy Mountain summit and the route from there to the Charleston summit.<\/p>\n The route they told us was to climb the 2nd avalanche chute where we could scrabble to the peak.\u00a0 We saw the guys following us once we reached the top of the chute and we let them know that their instructions were incorrect since we weren’t on the summit and there was no easy way down.\u00a0 We were at a notch in the top of the ridge with sheer 50ft cliffs on both sides and a very, very steep chute off the other side (picture below – notch is circled).<\/p>\n Traversing a chute can be fun, but it’s also really dangerous since you don’t know how steep it will get and you don’t know where the chute will dead end at too steep of cliff to go over.\u00a0 This would have caused us to climb back up and over the ridge\u00a0which wouldn’t be a lot of fun.\u00a0 The chute was steep but it was full of scree so we could “surf” on the way down.\u00a0 All was going well and we’d dropped about 800ft to 10500ft when we hit a wall about 25ft tall that required some down climbing.<\/p>\n The picture above is what it looked like from the top of the climb.\u00a0 Walton went first and nimbly shuffled down the face.\u00a0\u00a0When climbing with ropes, I’m completely comfortable doing sketchy thing, but dropping 25ft\u00a0on a sheer face without any safety gear had me unnerved.\u00a0 Walton patiently talked me through the maneuver and I made it down unscathed.\u00a0 After the wall, we continued to drop down the chute with only a few detours to move around ledges, until we finally reached the trail.\u00a0 We decided that we’d had enough and started heading back down the trail we should have been on in the first place.\u00a0 In a few minutes, we came to trail junction which is the 4 mile mark back to the trailhead.\u00a0 Walton is pointing to the chute that we came down below-\u00a0we dropped over 2000ft in that chute. \u00a0We pressed on and finally made it back to the road.\u00a0 At the road we were met by a herd of wild horses that were using the road as their trail.<\/p>\n We haven’t downloaded our watches yet to get the actually mapped distances, but we think we climbed about 6000ft over 12 miles.\u00a0 In total, we were out for 8 and half hours.\u00a0 It was a good day, but we will be back soon to successfully summit via the North Trail.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My friend, Chris Walton, and I went to Vegas this weekend.\u00a0 Our goal was to get up really early on Friday morning and climb the North loop trail of Mt Charleston.\u00a0\u00a0 The round trip is 20 miles and you start around 8200ft and climb 4000ft to the summit over 12000ft. Unfortunately, our plan did not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hikes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":394,"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions\/394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n