What a place! The mountains here have more vertical rise from the valley floor to the top of the peaks than that of the Teton Range. Theres quite bit of water here, no lakes, but about five creeks running off the east slope. It is a Wilderness Study Area (WSA), but has a few roads that slightly penetrate the the WSA. The longest are at Tom's Creek and Middle Canyon. These penetrate the WSA the furthest. Once you get off the valley floor these two routes are suitable only for ATVs. They are very narrow and although it doesn't say so anywhere, it looks like it is local practice to use ATVs only... Although I think they are technically open to all motor vehicles. We also drove into Indian Farm Canyon in the Subaru until about where the track crosses the creek, then came back out and camped on a small spur that headed off to the 
north towards Tom's Creek. Both Indian Farm and Tom's had a good amount of water flowing out of them. Besides these few ATV routes there is no trail system in the mountains. It is very rocky and fairly vegetated with very high vertical rise. These factors make much it the range very difficult to penetrate. Also note that most people who are climbing Ibapah Peak go into Granite Canyon and up that way. I have not been there, but I think there's water most of the way and that its a nice scenic route.When we discovered how steep, vegetated, rocky and rugged the range was we knew that utilizing one of the two ATV trails would be our best chance to get further into he range. We awoke from our camp between Indian Farm Creek and Toms Creek and drove over to the mouth of Middle Canyon. We were able to get right to the edge of the WSA in the Subaru and this gave us a pretty
big boost off the canyon floor. The ATV trail continues from where we parked and there is a fairly dramatic change from road to ATV trail at this point, although I think technically the road beyond is open to all vehicles. We started walking up the ATV route at Middle Canyon from this point this point. About a half mile up the road we ran into two dudes in camo driving ranger ATV who were fillin up water at the spring. They said that would be last water we would have until we got up to the basin. I was pretty surprised to see them. Our dog Lizzie did find a little water part way up Middle Canyon. It was a little pool in some Aspens about 15 feet south of the trail. The water was not visible from the trail.We ran into another guy coming down on a ATV with a huge Elk rack lashed to the front. The
rack was still attached to the skull which had a few old tufts of hair remaining. He said he had found it the night before in The Basin and gone back to get it that morning. In my opinion it hadn't been poached because it looked to old. Pretty nice hike up the the rim of the The Basin. A little hot but some shade and nice views. From the rim of The Basin we took a left and followed the ridge to the south over towards Tom's Canyon. This had some great views. It 
did have some ups and downs and one of the hemigogs we had to skirt on the north side was a little tuff. The ridge was too rocky and clify, the south was hot, clify and dense with Mountain Mahogany so we picked north. It was tuff but it was the only option. We made it over to the pass where the Tom's creek trail come up into the Basin. In retrospect, it may have been better to just drop down into The Basin.
Our route is shown below:
After about 5 hours we found ourselves on the ridge between the area known as The Basin and Tom's Creek (our location is shown as the small red dot on the map below) and we needed to find water. We were on a ridge and wanted to go higher but all the water was of coarse below us to either side. If we went into south into Tom's Creek we wouldn't lose much vertical but we were not sure if there was water there. To the north The Basin had water but it was quite a drop to get into. We had some decisions to make. What happened next was a little trick of terrain and a map reading subtlety that really taught me a lesson.
We decided to drop into Tom's Creek. (area shown as red square in the map below) The only map we had was the 1:100K (same as shown below) and it displayed the stream as intermittent, but you could hear a kind of rustle of water coming from the whole drainage and I could actually see water way up high running off of some rocks so I was pretty confident that it had water. But when we got down into the drainage...nothing! completely dry! I was perplexed and in kind of a tough situation. The kind of situation that was only a little bit bad but if careful decisions were not made, could snowball into a much worse situation. We decided to walk downstream to where the spring was marked on the map and where the stream turned from intermittent to perennial on the map. The backup plan was that if there was still no water there, Jill and Lizzie would sit tight and I would make the 2 hour round trip to the Basin and back to get water. So you can see how things can start to snowball. As we walked down towards the spring we all of a sudden heard the rush of water in the creek! We couldn't believe it, but there it was, the creek bubbling along. And it wasn't from the spring, we were still above that. It wasn't untill I got back home a looked at more maps that I realized what had happened and why we had failed to find the stream higher up.
The 1:24 map below shows that what had happened is the stream was actually not in the bottom of the Tom's Creek Drainage in the area were we looked. It was actually running along the side of the drainage in some kind of side gully. If I had looked closely at the map above I could have seen that. ( in the red square) Or if I had carried the more detailed map.
Events are numbered and described on the map below.
1. Where we left the ridge.
2. The bottom of the drainage where you would expect the creek to be.
3. Actual location of creek
4. Where Tom's Creek is somehow diverted out of the main channel.
5. Where Tom's Creek rejoins the main channel.
6. The spring
7.Where we could see water running off clify rocks.
Our Camp in Tom's Creek:
Ahhh... That desert grass. Fish Springs:
New secret windsurfing spot?
Posts
