Trip report
Jan 28, 2020 — Sunrise Mountain, Unity Peak, and Division Peak are three lesser-visited desert humps just east of Las Vegas. Since I look at them often enough, I felt like getting these peaks only seemed right. Apparently the official Frenchman Mountain Trailhead along East Lake Mead Blvd has lots of car break-ins, and although that trailhead would have brought us closer to our peaks, Austin and I decided to park elsewhere. Additionally, parking where we did facilitated a nice loop of the area So, we contrived a loop that would hit all three peaks (plus the baby Peak 2960) without any back-tracking.
We started from Shadow Rock Park, just on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The route we ended up with worked pretty well, but included a highway jog, the lovely sounds of guns firing at a shooting range, as well as sketchy just-outside-city-limits crap. So, it was still a park/hike at your own risk sort of deal. We left Shadow Rock Park and followed a dirt road heading east, hoping to leave the weird garbage-strewn desert to get to the ridge as fast as we could. People dump a lot of crap out here, and there was at least one abandoned car in the middle of nowhere. We encountered No Trespassing signs and assumed we wouldn't be able to continue, but I think these are just in place to keep people out of the shooting range located around here. So, we continued north on a dirt road until the No Trespassing signs disappeared and entered a drainage to the east. We headed up this Class 2 fun drainage and eventually onto Sunrise Mountain's western ridge. We passed over Peak 2960 and then dropped down on some Class 2, continuing along the lumpy ridge toward Sunrise Mountain. We encountered a section of Class 3, avoidable with some route-finding, just south of the summit. Just after this short scramble, we got to a final short traverse where we kept to the left to avoid excessive rock-hopping. Once on the summit of Sunrise Mountain, we peered across the valley to the south toward Unity Peak and Division Peak, locating a dirt road that would lead to a saddle between the two peaks. On the summit, it sounded vaguely like what might be a war zone with a shooting range to the west and jets roaming around on the air force base to the north. Lovely.
We dropped south off Sunrise Mountain on rocky Class 2 terrain, entering a shallow gully and entering the valley floor. We jogged through the open desert and stumbled on the dirt road noted earlier from above, which we used to head to the saddle separating Division and Unity Peaks. The gunshots were a little scary and we wanted to clear the valley as quickly as possible. From the saddle, we hit Unity Peak first to the north, which included a short bit of loose Class 2+ to the summit. We dropped back to the saddle and encountered some solid, fun Class 3 to gain the north face of Division Peak. I thought this little section was the best part of the day. A scenic almost-knife-edge led to just north of Division Peak's summit knob, and a short Class 2+ move wrapped around the right side of the knob to gain the summit.
We scoped possible routes down from Division Peak, settling on continuing along the west ridge for a little bit (Class 2) and then dropping down when we thought would work best. We opted to follow a ridge that ended up including a Class 4 move. This can be avoided by dropping into the drainage to the right before starting down on the ridge (marked on the attached map). Either way, we were on East Lake Mead Blvd. We followed the road for a few miles back to Shadow Rock Park.