Fugads Geocaching Blog: Whiskey Ridge

Whiskey Ridge, the Thumb and Higher peaks

The biggest untapped geocaching/hiking/scrambling playground near to our home is the Sandia Mountains eat of Albuquerque. I would guess there are readily more than 1000 geocaches in this range, there are 20 or so good hiking trails and plenty off-trail hiking explorations, and the rocky mountains off really adventurous ridge walks and 5th class climbing. All this only an hour or so away and yet I have rarely visited the range, usually opting to explore further to the North of Santa Fe. I have no good reason for this. Maybe the proximity to the big city and the potential for large crowds, or the overwhelming # of geocaches making it difficult to focus on just one place to go? I don't know. But one unfound cache on Whiskey Ridge finally lured me down to the range.

The geocache, GC7FNN5, placed by DesertRomantic who I've hiked with before, is located on a pretty cool looking Rocky ridge that stretches from the 2nd tower of the Sandia Tram, back up to Whiskey peak about a mile into the mountains. At places it looks to be as narrow as 10' across with steep 100+ ft drop-offs on either side. A month or so ago, I was able to get a good look at it when the family rode the tram, and I decided then that it would be an awesome adventure. Most of it looked scramblable, but the cache listing mentions that 5th class climbing is required and that technical climbing gear is also advised. There are geocaches located on either side of GC7FNN5 called "SUCCESS .. sort of" and "FAILURE" along the ridge, placed by a geocacher who was trying to traverse the ridge on his own but couldn't due to some of the 5th class obstacles along the way. One geocacher had made an attempt on GC7FNN5 since it was published last December, RockyMtnRidgeRunner, and he had turned around due to lack of time.

With unknown amounts of 5th class climbing involved, I figured this cache should not be attempted solo, so I contacted RockyMtnRidgeRunner, to see if he would up for another attempt of it. I have never hiked or climbed with him before, but have had several email exchanges with him about various lonely caches throughout the state, and he is one of my favorite geocache hiders in New Mexico. His hides almost always involve long hikes into the wilderness, and are placed at prominent features along those hikes such as mountain summits or deep canyons. Despite not ever meeting the guy, I felt pretty sure that we would make a good team for going after Whiskey Ridge. Plus, he is intimately familiar with the Sandias and teaming up with him would mean having a expert guide for route-finding and approaches/descents. I was psyched to hear back from him that he wanted to go for it and we spent a week making plans and figuring out logistics for our trip.

Early morning view from La Luztrail

I left Santa Fe early Friday morning to met up with RMRR at 7am at the Sandia Tram parking lot. Our plan was to leave one vehicle there, and drive over to the La Luz trailhead to start our ascent. The La Luz trail is one of the few trails in the range I had heard of and read about, I think it is one of the more popular and well traveled trails in the range. The morning was cool and the skies were mostly clear, perfect hiking weather. We started off immediately at a pretty good clip. There are a bunch of geocaches along or just off the La Luz trail and normally, I'd stop to look for each one, significant;y slowing progress up the trail. We did stop at a few, but also skipped by a bunch. Not only has RMRR already found all of these, but we also needed to make good time up to Whiskey Peak so that we would have enough daylight to complete our route. RMRR showed me several of the shortcuts that one can take going up the La Luz trail, that shave off miles of hiking. In a few hours we were at the base of the granite monoliths, deep in a lush (by NM standards) canyon populated by aspen and fir trees. It's a really pretty hike and I can see why it is popular. At the base of the rock formation known as The Thumb we split up to allow me to tag two additional lonely caches in the area, The Thumb GC1ECPW and Whiskey on My Mind GC32NHG. We had discussed this on the way up, these two geocaches would be close enough to our route that I thought I could push hard and find them both and still meet up with RMRR on top of Whiskey peak. RMRR of course had already found them, but was ok with splitting up so I could go after them. Plus we had 2-way radios so we could stay in touch.

Upper La Cueva Canyon with the rock formation known as The Frog in the middle

Getting up to the geocache on the Thumb was steep hiking, and I was definitely feeling the weight of my pack, laden with a rope and climbing gear and lots of water. It was slower going than I had thought it would be, but then I didn't realize quite how much elevation I would be gaining over a short distance. Oof! I made it up to the spot where my GPSr was getting close to zero, and began searching, only to come up empty. There is a pretty decent hint for this geocache, but it still leaves loads of possible areas to search, and I just wasn't finding anything. My problem turned out to be that I was too low. While my GPSr said I was close, I was also at the base of a cliff and it turns out the cache was more on the top of the cliff. After a ton of searching, I finally read one of the previous finder's logs about climbing out an exposed ridge and it was only then that I finally figured out where I was supposed to be and climbed up the descent route of the Thumb and got to where the cache was located. An easy find then! But I had wasted probably 30 minutes looking for this cache. Even at the cache location, the coords seemed pretty far off from GZ, but that's part of the difficulty of caches like this one, perched on high narrow rocky ledges, and placed against steep rock walls. Coords can be off a little and send you pretty far away due to the vertical drops. I was glad to finally make the find, but I was also pretty sure that RMRR would be close to the summit of Whiskey Peak already.

On the flank of the Thumb

I had radio communication with RMRR, who was almost at the top of Whiskey Peak already. I had a ways to go to catch up! I quickly decended down a gully on the south side of the Thumb and then booked it over to a geocache called Whiskey on My Mind. The cool thing about this cache is it gives you a great viewpoint of the entire Whiskey Ridge, where er would be spending the rest of our afternoon. This cache I found quickly, snapped a few pictures and then raced off to Whiskey peak. Getting over to Whiskey peak was a bit of a slog, some real steep gully climbs and also a bit of dense bush-whacking, but tired and exhausted, I made it up to Whiskey Peak where a well-rested RMRR was waiting for me. He allowed me a quick breather to hydrate and wolf down and a sandwich and then we were off down Whiskey Ridge and the adventure was begun!

RMRR getting ready to head down Whiskey Ridge

The first bit of Whiskey Ridge is a piece of cake, jsut easy hiking down a rocky ridge. There is some good exposure on either side, but it is never that narrow or that exposed. The difficulties begin just past a cache called Failure, , which was placed by Wolf11469 and named for his failure to get all the way down the ridge. The difficulties lie in first a 20' vertical down climb to a notch, followed by a 50ft climb up a chossy, lichen filled face. The lichen face actually had a fixed rope on it, with butterfly knots tied in it every 5 ft or so. I tackled the down-climb and was checking out the fixed rope when RMRR got stuck. The down-climb wasn't too hard, but it was a little awkward and some of the rock was suspect, and there was a huge drop off on either side. Sure the notch below offerred a 10' wide perch where you could land, but tumble either side from that and you'd be a goner. Perhaps I should have been as cautious as RMRR, but I was down already. I took out my rope and rack and climbed almost all the way up to RMRR, then placed three pieces of protection on the descent. After handing him the rope, this allowed him to be belayed on the down-climb and not have to risk a death fall. Since we already had the rope and rack out, I volunteered to elad up the chossy lichen climb as well. The climbing was easy but the loose rock made it kind of scary. Also, the loose rock made finding a good placement for nuts/cams really difficult. Nearly every little fissure where I could place something seemed to be bordered by a rock that would simply blow-out if pressure was applied to it... say in a fall. Luckily, the fixed line was a stout 11mm rope, and I just clipped caribiners into it for protection on. I'm glad it was there.

Approaching the first difficulty.. the tree on the ridge ahead has a fixed rope with loops in it going down to the notch below.

After this climb there was a small ridge-top of easy walking before another downclimb was encountered, but we both descended that without problem and reach another notch in the ridge with a small perch and steep cliffs on either side. It almost looked like there would be a scrambling route down the south face, but it alos looked a lot more fun to stay on the knife edge ridge and climb a short 100ft pitch up to a larger broader part of the ridge. Once again, I volunteered to lead. This time the climbing was superb, the rock was good quality, there were excellent placements for gear and the exposure and position, high on a rocky spine with immense drop-offs on both sides... it was great! But I wouldn't want to do it without a rope.

RMRR approaches the climbing pitch. The line we took is directly above his helmet in the picture

RMRR negotiates a move to reach the belay stance at the base of the climbing pitch

This section proved to be the last real climbing we would need to do. After a nice easy section of walking there was one small 10ft downclimb, which I lowered RMRR down, and then down-climbed myself and then we were at the geocache that was the reason for our adventure, GC7FNN5, FTF for both of us! We celebrated by taking off our packs and eating lunch.

From the cache, we were surprised that there weren't any 5th class obstacles until just before the next cache on the ridge, where RMRR had ended up last December with his son. The webbing he used for a rappel was still in place and in good shape, so we rigged it for our own rappel. Instead of rappelling down and staying on the ridge, we did a 25m rappel off the north side a straight show down and an easy pull. This spot left us with a little ledge scramble to get over to the main ridge, and final and the cache Success...sort of. And then it was 3rd class scrambling all the way down to tower 2. Not to say the scrambling was without its merits, parts of it were across narrow bands of rock with huge drops on either side, par for the course when doing Whiskey Ridge as we now know.

"Easy" sections of Whiskey Ridge below our FTF cache

50m rappel just before GC3GRH6

Looking back up the ridge a short ways west of the rappel.

At tower 2, I found the older cache there, and we snapped shots of the trams passing close over head. Then I let RMRR lead me back down to the tram parking. This consisted mainly of bouldery ridges, thick desert scrub and inscrutable sun. Luckily it was all down hill. I polished off the last of my water on the descent and was thankful that we didn't have far to go to get back to the car. RMRR then shuttled me back to the La Luz trailhead where we parted ways. All in all, a good day out, covering lots of new ground, and exercising my very atrophied rock climbing skills. It felt good to tie back into a rope and place gear, even if we only did so for some very short pitches. Makes me want to come back and try out some of the longer routes here in the Sandias. Maybe someday soon.