Doña Ana Mountains ( Rock Climber's Trail, Copper Prospect Ridge)

I did these two hikes on consecutive days during my spring break last week. On Tuesday I headed out early to the trailhead not exactly sure what I was going to do. I had been here many years ago on  my first visit to Doña Anas thinking it was the where I should start my hike to Doña Ana Peak.  I searched in vain for some sort of passage that fit in with the hike description I had,but, as it turned out, that trailhead was actually about 1/3 of a mile to the southwest.
 I parked, looked around at the boulders nearby, and began walking in a northwesterly direction. At first I didn't take the obvious trail, thinking it was for bicycles and wouldn't  take me to the  higher country where I wanted to go, but I soon got on the path and quickly realized that no one would be riding a bike on this route. Soon thereafter it dawned on me that this was the  trail that rock climbers take to the base of the Checkerboard Square wall. Of  course it is,  I thought to myself, and now I was glad to be on it. It was mostly easy to follow through the wonderful terrain of jumbled boulders  below and  steep towers of deeply etched rhyolite above.

Though small in area and less lofty, the Doña Anas are surely the most scenic of the Desert Peaks ranges in our Organ Mountains Desert Peaks National Monument. The steady climbing trail eventually brought me to a hidden basin area below the high ridge with more and more boulders of gigantic size. I headed upward deciding to investigate this lower terrain later after I had reached the end of the trail at the base of the Checkerboad Wall.


 As I went higher the clear channel of  the path faded, and I realized I was  more or less on my own to make it to  the rock climber's jumping off point. I did,  and then took a break to drink, when I spied a couple of climbers coming up the path I had just hiked. I chatted with both a bit as I headed back down to explore the boulders in the basin and check out the dry waterfall that cuts through the lower ridge that conceals it.


 I hiked northeast now through the brushy, but not exceptionally thorny terrain to where I could easily climb over the little ridge and then head south steeply downhill to yet another field of pinkish tan boulders  where I then picked up a nice wide bike trail that nearly took back to my vehicle, walking just a few hundred yards cross country to get there.

 On Wednesday, I got out a little later, and it was bit warmer,but still tolerable. I decided to conquer Copper Prospect Ridge, a very rugged, but significantly lower than highest parts of range, little mountain that runs east to west for about a mile from the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Park to the pass where the powerlines run through. I parked right at the pass on the powerline road and immediately started chugging up steep hill in front of me.
I was probably trying to get away from the crackling sound I could hear in the high voltage wires which always gives me the creeps. Up on top I  found an old mining prospect, and began clambering my way east through the  broken and bouldery surface of the monzonite porphyry dike that makes up the ridgetop. At times I was going through directly on the spine of the ridge, but at others I thought it more prudent to descent a bit and follow deer trails along the flanks right below the exposures of bedrock.
It was quite a scramble, I doubt I could take the same route through there a second time if  I tried. Along the way, I found a dead great horned owl who appeared to have been shot,  and the remnants of someone's lonely campfire at a small clearing on top of the ridge. The hike is very up and down due to several large notches in the ridge line where softer rock intervenes between layers of harder stuff.
The ridge terminates  like it began with  rounded hills of  purplish Cleofas andesite covered with grass, tarbush and broom snakeweed. I peered over the edge of the highest hill and saw the small tailings piles of the old copper prospects below and then set out west investigating the many huge boulders that had tumbled off the mountain.  Some have been down at the bottom a long time as indicated by smooth patches that encircle them at about the 7 to 9 foot interval where  it is believed that mastodons and mammoths rubbed their shaggy heads. Jackrabbits and bunnies materialized and then darted off. A group of deer watched me from the slopes above. I  found another old mining prospect dug out in a gully. Before returning to my car, I decided to wander around the truly huge boulders on the west side of the powerline road hoping to  find some rock art, megafauna rubbings, or grindholes, but all I found was scat, lots and lots of scat in the shadows of every rock of larger size.