Ragged Top Summit Traditional Cache
-
Difficulty:
-
-
Terrain:
-
Size: 
(regular)
Please note Use of geocaching.com services is subject to the terms and conditions
in our disclaimer.
This geocache is located on the summit of Ragged Top Mountain, which is located in the Ironwood Forest National Monument.
In my book Ragged Top Mountain is the quintessential desert summit. Its craggy summit sits isolated and invincible in a sea of Ironwoods, Palo Verdes and Saguaros. Sitting at the base of the mountain with a set of binoculars, one puzzles at all the many routes apparently leading to the summit but only dead ending at the foot of a steep rock headwall or cliff band. There are no established hiking trails to the top, only game trails.
The cache is well hidden among the summit boulders, it is a small tan painted PVC container with a log and a pencil. Note that there is a climbers summit register on top, it is a plastic container in an old mailbox (see photo), this is not the cache.
A note about the ratings: The four star difficulty rating is for route finding to the summit. It is easy to mistake a class 4 chimney with a class 5 offwidth from the ground with a pair of binoculars…trust me on this one. There are many routes to the summit, the easiest is not obvious until you descend. The 4.5 star rating for terrain is from the bushwacking up steep terrain to the summit headwall and the class 3 climbing up the summit headwall.
(1/31/03) I did not do my homework on this peak until after I had placed and submitted the cache. One bit of information that I found may have changed my timing of when I climbed the peak. Ironwood Forest National Monument contains what may be the last viable population of indigenous desert bighorn sheep to the Tucson basin. Ragged Top Mt. is prime desert bighorn sheep habitat: the sheep use the cliffs to escape predators, as travel corridors, and lambing grounds. Humans can negatively impact the population dynamics by intruding upon the sheep during breeding and lambing seasons. Breeding season occurs in August and September while lambing occurs during February. Note that the BLM is considering a seasonal closure of Ragged Top and other areas for this reason.
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)
Treasures
You'll collect a digital Treasure from one of these collections when you find and log this geocache:
Loading Treasures