White Rock Hills Peak East to South (via Diamond Ridge) - 3/15/13

 Today, the super hikers chose White Rock Hills Peak to summit via Diamond Ridge. They made their ascent on the east side of the peak then traversed over to the south side and descended back to the cars. The hike was four miles in length with 2924 feet of elevation gain. These statistics show quite a bit of very steep and challenging scrambling. Laszlo contributed the photos, Richard contributed the GPS information and Jerry jumps in with an interesting narration for the day as follows:

The day started out overcast but warm when ten hikers met at Albertson's to try out an alternative route to the summit of White Rock Hills.  We parked at the Willow Springs picnic area and started hiking on the White Rock Hills Loop trail counter clockwise around the southeastern base of the mountain.  We hiked about 0.6 miles on the trail and then went off-trail heading for the first or southern most canyon on the east side of the mountain.  We started scrambling up this canyon until about halfway up when a particularly keen geocacher in the group took off to look for a nearby geocache.

   After a short break we continued up the canyon to a point at 5400 feet of elevation where we veered out of the canyon onto steep sandstone slabs.  There were steep sections along the way that tested the scrambling abilities of the group but no one had any significant problems.  We were approaching the summit when the author (me) stepped on a foothold that gave way.  The injury was not bad but was more of a contusion to the shin area (ouch!).  Upon reaching the summit the leader supplied an ice filled bottle of water to reduce the swelling and first aid was applied to the wound.  We took the compulsory photos at the top and started back down.  The route down followed the same route that was taken on April 14th, 2011 but instead of going down the canyon on the northwest side we traversed over to the southwest face overlooking Willow Springs.  We made our descent on this face of the mountain looking down at our cars all of the way.  The clouds cleared during our descent and it started to get much hotter.  We were all happy to reach the bottom of the mountain within 50 yards of our vehicles! ~ Jerry