Hike Granite Mountain Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, CA

Feb 23, 2024 — Located in the southwest corner of Anza Borrego State Park in Southern California, Granite Mountain is a prominent summit within a transitional zone, where the brushy and forested terrain above meets the desert landscape below. The peak's granitic features awarded it a super-generic name, but like most Granite Mountains I've hiked, it's a good time. Chris and I chose to hike the standard route from the east, starting within Cool Canyon. A social trail is visible a fair amount of the hike, but its presence isn't enough to consider this steep trek a "trail". To reach the trailhead, leave pavement and head west here (33.05566, -116.42061) along Cool Canyon Road, likely accessible to passenger cars.

We hiked through Cool Canyon, enjoying its winding features and occasional little dryfall scrambles until reaching a junction of various drainages at a spur ridge marked with a cairn. Heading up this spur ridge is the most direct route out of Cool Canyon, and it seemed to make most sense to get to the higher terrain faster rather than stay low within the drainages. There weren't a lot of cairns marking the way at first, but a social trail slowly materialized, presumably as more hikers joined the ridge from various points after emerging from the drainages. Often a bit steep, the spur ridge was easy to follow and overall free of major rock obstacles or tedious cacti.

At around 4000', we approached a granite-filled slope and the social trail etching disappeared. Rather than continue directly through this mess, we determined it made more sense to side-hill around the fringe of these boulders, minimizing our scrambling. This worked out nicely since only a couple hundred feet included any Class 2 of note. Past here the slope continued steeply, but without the boulders. We reached a lump overlooking Granite Mountain to the west, a gorgeous-looking summit still a bit of work away.

We dropped down from the lump on trivial terrain to the western saddle of our peak, locating a social trail that led us to the east ridge. Here is where we encountered the start of the fun, a sea of granite with all sorts of enjoyable Class 2/2+ (and Class 3 if you're off-route too far), even including a couple of rabbit hole crawl-through spaces. It's difficult to describe the route since we weaved in and out of the boulders for well over half a mile, but keeping to the crest seems to be the best course of action, even though cairns often lead in various directions. The trail is defined enough that if you're not seeing previous hikers' footprints, you're likely off-route. It's an enjoyable session of easy route-finding with a wide margin for error. The views down toward the various named valleys below progressively improved, and despite the relative popularity of the peak, we were surprised we didn't see another party on the mountain all day.

We reached a false summit not far away from the top, and past here there's an array of granitic boulders along the crest that are easy to wrap around. The summit of Granite Mountain included a Class 2+ scramble to its top, where we got excellent views in all directions.