Boots Across the Baja

6. Mountain Moonlight

This is the sixth of a seven-part series about a December 1982 trek across the Baja—enjoy! Will post the final Part 7 shortly. Part 1 is here. —Ken

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Morning dawned gloriously with shards of sunshine lighting up the higher rock walls above. We continued up the canyon through narrows and more open areas, before negotiating a slightly difficult waterfall that invited brief use of the rope. Randall Henderson’s account of their March 1934 unsuccessful attempt on the mountain, also from the eastern slope, is contained in Desert Magazine, a publication he founded in 1937. He described conditions similar to what we found: slick rock, pools, falls, agave, manzanita. But the climbers were met with a serious rainstorm, falling as snow high above, and decided to retreat. He wrote:

Rubber on wet rocks is treacherous footing. Our feet were cold and our soggy [tennis] shoes began to disintegrate.

They returned a year later in perfect weather and reached a subsidiary summit late in the day, separated from the true summit by a chasm six-hundred feet deep. Again, they were forced to retreat. Two years later, in 1937, the third try was a success. Although the climbers ascended more directly from the desert, Henderson had this to say about the lovely canyon they viewed from above:

Diablo Canyon is a tremendous gash in the range … I’m sure Diablo has some gorgeous vistas for the photographer whose heart and legs are stout enough to pack his equipment up this great canyon.

The great gash passed under our boot soles and my bad ankle one slow mile at a time. With no camera and minimal down time to scribble any sketches for posterity, we’d just have to file away all this gorgeous scenery in our heads.