Hike Lizard Peak and Aubrey Hills SARA Mountain Park, AZ

Nov 18, 2021 — This hike is located just south of Lake Havasu City. It's located within the Special Activities and Recreation Area (SARA), and is far more popular and developed than it appears online or on a map. Mountain biking trails spider web around the area and although pretty, it's not the wilderness experience we were expecting. Overall I'd say this is a nice area to check out, but only use our route as a rough outline of what to do. As you can see from my attached map, it's sort of a mess. Because of the existence of so many mountain biking trails, I added the few off-trail sections we did in blue for reference. You can likely formulate a unique loop that sticks to trails completely by staring at a satellite map and inspecting the trails from there. Our main goal was to bag Peak 1379, but we ended up failing at that. Instead this ended up being just a bit of an exploratory ramble through the desert. Hopefully you can at least use the pictures to get a sense of what to expect out here if planning to visit the area.

The first objective for us would be to take the official trail loop that heads up to Lizard Peak. This route starts along a very wide trail, which leads into a wash. A trail marker points out of the wash and started to ascend the east slope of Lizard Peak. On the way, we took a small detour to visit what SARA Park advertises as the "Lizard Geoglyph". It's just a modern-made lizard sculpture, not a petroglyph. Back on the trail, we ascended the steep trail and encountered a fun, short Class 3 move to get over a cliff band and reach the saddle on the north side of Lizard Peak. Class 2 along the trail led to Lizard Peak's summit. To continue the loop, we started south on tight trail switchbacks, which wrapped around a buch of little cliffs and then continued at the base of the major cliff band that surrounds much of Lizard Peak. The views here were the best of the day, accentuated by the pleasant sesnsation of walking on a trail.

The trail system led down into an unnamed wash, where we started to ascend east through it. We came this far because we wanted to check out a feature known as SARA's Crack. I suppose someone thought the acronym combined with Crack sounded funny. The child in me couldn't help but shake my head with slight amusement. It's a pretty slot canyon with pink walls and a similar vibe to canyons found near Lake Mead. It's also complete with broken ladders and a rope for ascending. Without this additional gear getting through the canyon would be light Class 3. Once through The Crack, we continued through the drainage and decided to leave it in order to ascend a small hill and enter the region marked on maps as Aubrey Hills. We were only off-trail for a short time before we stumbled on a mountain bike trail. We followed it generally southeast, enjoying the pleasant desert scenery and trail. In my experience, trails are difficult to come by in the desert surrounding the Colorado River, so I was surprisingly more happy than I thought I'd be.

Peak 1379 came into view, and we both got pretty excited to try to summit. Not knowing anything about this peak, we wrapped around to its east side where the substantial cliff band at the peak's base seemed like it would be less severe, but no luck. I included this section on my attached map, but ultimately the peak is Class 5. We found a pile of rocks at the lowest point on the south side of the peak. We added more boulders to it and Craig scrambled up, but he reported that there were more severe cliffs above. We backed off. If you manage to ascend this one, please let me know any info! We descended off-trail down to a Water Tank feature below. I incuded an alternative trail route on my map to avoid our mishap that's possible to use to get to the Water Tank.

At the water tank, we realized we were running out of daylight and couldn't explore deeper into the Aubrey Hills. Instead we followed a trail to the base of Peak 1240 and decided to use this as a consolation prize. It ultimately ended up being a bit of fun and had great views. To reach the summit, we ascended the steep southern slope, wrapped around the peak's east face on Class 2/3 terrain, and then used a Class 3/3+ chute to gain the ridgeline. From here it was a short and narrow ridge walk to the high point. To get down, we backtracked down the chute and decided to descend to the north, a loose, steep, and ugly scree/talus slope. If you have time, I recommend looking for a better route. There is a mountain biking trail that wraps round the eastern and northern base of Peak 1240, and while this leads a bit out of the way, it might provide a more pleasant experience. Either way, we ended up in a wash below and followed it west, then another wash north until we encountered another trail. We took this trail back to the trailhead just as the sun set.