The day we finished the 20 highest peaks in Arizona last year, Brandon and myself were sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Holbrook, wondering what adventure we should try next. “New Mexico is cool. Does it have any peakbagging lists?” Sure enough, Peter Gilroy had just compiled a list of the 12,000’ peaks in New Mexico. With some quick research and help from Peter, we decided it was doable and eventually chose a mid-September start date, hoping this would be late enough to avoid the annual Wheeler Peak closure. The closure dates aren’t published much ahead of time and they change slightly every year but usually are in late summer.
On Friday night (September 13) Brandon picked me up from the airport in Albuquerque and we headed to a hotel for a few hours of sleep.
Day 1: A few days before the start we noticed that the road to Ski Santa Fe would be closed for construction on every day of the week except Sunday. We had planned on doing those southern three peaks Saturday and then we had a campsite reserved at the trailhead for the big northern Pecos loop on Saturday and Sunday nights. If we still wanted to do the southern three on Saturday we would have to start at the Windsor Creek trailhead, adding about six miles to the loop. We chose to do this, partly because of the campground reservation and not wanting to wake up super early Saturday to do the big Pecos loop, and partly because Brandon wanted to “warm up with the marathon.” We started from Windsor Creek at 10:47am on September 18, late enough to not waste as much daylight before the big Pecos loop the next day. This was probably a logistical error, in large part because we failed to tag E Pecos Baldy on the Pecos loop and later had to drive all the way south again past the Windsor Creek trailhead. In any case the loop was beautiful and the bushwhack up Redondo Peak wasn’t too bad. This was one of the few places we actually saw other hikers on the trails. We were feeling the altitude though coming from near sea level the day before and we started to suspect that we might be in for more than we bargained.
Day 2: Our suspicions were confirmed on Sunday. The Pecos Wilderness has nine 12ers in the north that form a beautiful loop and one slightly to the south of that loop (E Pecos Baldy). Peter had split those peaks up into four separate excursions. We had the bright idea to try to combine all ten peaks into one massive loop. It probably would have worked fine if we were well rested and had scouted the area first. Counter clockwise was definitely the way to go as this allowed us to get Trampas and Sheepshead out of the way, isolated peaks that Peter had done each individually. We couldn’t find anyone who took the exact routes to either of these peaks before, but it worked ok, still taking more time than we thought it would. By the time we left the col to scramble over to Truchas Peak, we realized that we would be doing good to get done by midnight even if we skipped E Pecos Baldy. It added six miles total and a lot of extra driving but we decided to skip it. We still ended up finishing after 4:00 the next morning.
Days 3 & 4: We “slept in” the next day, knowing the weather forecast was questionable both Monday and Tuesday. We looked at several forecasts and decided to drive around and catch the outlying isolated peaks in breaks in the weather, saving the larger more exposed loops for Wednesday and Thursday, when the forecast was good.
Monday afternoon, after a wait for some road construction, we made it up to Touch-me-not mountain, the easternmost peak. This is the only peak that has a road that gets remotely close to its summit. Peter had driven partway up the road, parking 3000’ elevation below the summit on a 4-wheel drive road, likely a nod to the “Colorado rule,” a somewhat complicated guideline for Colorado 14er peakbagging to lessen the ability of people with expensive off-road vehicles to gain as much of an advantage, being able to drive to the top of super gnarly 14er access roads, and to give each summit a fair effort. We had a Camry, so we parked at the bottom of the road, a little over a mile farther from the summit. Perhaps parking here should be considered the “trailhead” for this challenge? We watched the weather approaching the summit and though there was some questionable weather to the south of us, it wasn’t getting any closer. The summit was windy and foggy, but beautiful!
We got a hotel in Taos that night, hoping to take advantage of forecasted breaks in the weather to tag Little Costilla in the far north in the morning and to catch E Pecos Baldy in the south which we had missed on Sunday. We had decent weather Tuesday for Little Costilla in the morning. We saw a few friendly elk hunters near the road who had just shot a large bull bowhunting. We ran into two herds of elk ourselves, one in the trees and one near the summit. There isn’t an official trail but rather some social paths that roughly follow an old fence line. Watch out for the barbed wire! This may be the most dangerous part of any of the peaks.
We made the long drive down to the Jack’s Creek trailhead, where we camped that night, hoping the lightning would let up that evening so we could tag E Pecos Baldy. It stormed and hailed well into the evening, so we decided to get an early start the next morning.
Day 5:
We left the TH Wednesday just before 4:00am, jogging past piles of hail, catching the sunrise before we reached the summit. We then had three larger loops left, the Wheeler Cirque, the Latirs, and the Gold Hill-Lobo Peak loop, which we decided to do that evening. As we were leaving the trailhead to tag the three peaks just after 2:00pm, a search and rescue worker finishing her hike asked us:
“are you going all the way to Lobo?”
“Yes”
“It’s pretty late to start a hike to Lobo.”
We didn’t bother mentioning that we were planning on tagging two more peaks that evening, or that this would be our 18th peak in 4 1/2 days.
This was a gorgeous ridgeline! You can see almost all of the 12ers from Lobo, and a few Colorado 14ers. We made it to Gold Hill just before dark, in a strong chilling wind, passing several bighorn sheep but again, no people. We jogged the nine miles or so down the beautiful singletrack and the road back to the car with a full moon at our backs.
Day 6: We still had 11 peaks left for Thursday. This would be a long day but we had perfect weather. We started up Wheeler Peak just before sunrise. This is the only New Mexico peak I had been on before. But this time we would be doing the ridge traverse to peak 12,819 and beyond, something I’d wanted to try for years. The scramble isn’t very difficult (though there is certainly some exposure) but there was just the slightest hint of ice in the shady spots. We began to realize that there really wasn’t much time left in the year to try this project. The traverse and the out and back to Vallecito were beautiful, but they took much longer than we expected and the steep initial descent down the ski hill wasn’t easy either.
It was after 2:00pm by the time we got back to the car. No sense in holding back now. We drove up to Cabresto Road, driving partway up the rough road to a dispersed campsite then walked up to the trailhead. We got the Baldy Cabin Peak bushwhack done before dark, but that turned out to be a non-issue. The bushwhack was much better than some of the “trails” we had been on on other peaks. My main regret of the trip was that we did most of this loop in the dark. By the light of the moon these peaks appeared to have some stunning cirques and ridgelines. We’ll have to go back. My ankle was starting to hurt so we slowed down and walked the last few miles. We made it back to the trailhead at 2:24am on Friday, 5 days, 15 hours and 37 minutes after we started. We celebrated Saturday by hiking up two 14ers in Colorado. Clearly, we hadn’t pushed hard enough.
This was an incredible experience on rugged peaks that we knew almost nothing about beforehand. A huge thanks to Peter Gilroy for organizing this route and helping us beforehand with logistics, and running it for the first time, even if a lot of his effort had to fit in around work. 17 days is not a bad time at all. Thanks also to Phil Robinson, who has hiked New Mexico’s 186 highest peaks, for documenting so much of his peakbagging in New Mexico.
The peaks are remote. We saw 15-20 people on the Windsor Trail, 10-15 people near Trampas Lakes, one couple on the back side of Santa Fe Baldy and a few people on Wheeler Peak. Besides that, we didn’t see any hikers who weren’t right by the road. Some of the registers on peaks (on the few that did have registers) only had three or four entries so far this year.
In total we had around 165 miles of hiking/running with 53,000 feet of elevation gain. We had about 650 miles and 16 hours of driving, way more than the most efficient route. Neither of us were acclimated. Only one of us had been on one of the peaks before. Someone could go way faster with better knowledge of the route and perfect weather.