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Mar 23, 2019 — My first visit to the Whipple Mountains near Lake Havasu City helped me fall in love with the area. It sort of feels like a strange hybrid between the volcanic peaks within Lake Mead NRA and the cliffy mesas found in southern Arizona. The route I planned hits three interesting little peaks that hover over Whipple Wash: Porthole Mountain, Muffin Peak, and Cupcake Mountain. Cupcake has an official trail to the top (trailhead located at 34.3713234,-114.3118487), which I only followed for a short time, but would shorten the day significantly, though lose quite a bit of the interesting stuff along the way. Note that even though I rated this route Class 2, keeping it at that rating would require a bunch of time-consuming work-arounds. There are a bunch of potential Class 2+/3 moves you could pull to keep the route more direct, especially when ascending Whipple Wash.
I went through the gorgeous Whipple Wash, lots of boulder obstacles along the way, but not enough to be annoying. There was a short section of relaly interesting, unexpected narrows toward where I split off to the north to ascend up to higher ground. Within this split, a series of tall dryfalls forced me to ascend on an animal trail to west, but fortunately the route went at Class 2+. Once at the head of this side-drainage, I located a reasonable route up the southwest face of Porthole Mountain, summitted, and then continued along its ridge to the interesting arch that overlooked Whipple Wash below.
From the summit of Porthole Mountain, I continued north and descended a steep gully, though many routes down are viable. I continued back up to Muffin Peak, where again, I would say there are multiple viable routes. The one I took had a Class 2+ headwall, and the views from the summit were really nice and helped give me some sense of the Whipple Mountains' layout: how the higher sections to the northwest seemed a bit boring and gray, and the southwest was riddled with interesting canyons and dark mesas. I descended from Muffin Peak the same way and then worked up the southeast slope of Cupcake Mountain, where I followed the official Cupcake Mountain Trail down through a socially-eroded gully and to the head of my chosen drainage to descend to the east. I first decided to follow a ridge to the north of the drainage to enjoy some wildflowers, rather than immediately dropping into the drainage. I also initially toyed with the idea of following the Cupcake Mountain Trail all the way back and making my way back via the road, but wildflowers and wilderness looked more interesting than that, plus it was more direct than following the road would have been.
Eventually, the ridge seemed to start ascending, so I dropped south just in time for the drainage to become interesting. A series of rock formations and dryfalls led do a trickling waterfall that could likely be downclimbed when not wet, but it appeared slippery, so I took a work-around to its base. The drainage continued to Whipple Wash, with great views, lighting, and wildflowers the whole way.
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