Percha Creek

Percha Creek sits near Hillsboro, out toward Kingston and the Black Range, under the NM-152 bridge a few minutes past town — the most casual crag in this book to reach, a five-minute walk from a pullout to routes on the creek’s east bank. The rock is called andesite in most of what we have found, but at least one source calls it basalt instead; the two volcanic rocks are easy to confuse from a distance and we have not resolved which is right. Mountain Project’s area page for it carries one of the lowest ID numbers in the whole Truth or Consequences tree, which suggests the place has been quietly known for a long time, well before Mud Mountain or the Bat Cave revival. It is also, so far as our research has turned up, the only crag in the county with real crack climbing — a mixed bag of bolted face and natural gear that matters disproportionately in an area otherwise built almost entirely on sport.

A caution before anything else: access here is unresolved, and active — see Approach & access below before you read any further.

Plate reserved — hand-drawn map & photographs to come

The rock — and the creek that named a formation

Percha Creek gave its name to North American stratigraphy before it gave its name to a crag. C. H. Gordon named the Percha Shale in 1907 for exposures on this creek; F. V. Stevenson designated a type section near Hillsboro in 1945, splitting it into the lower Ready Pay Member — dark fissile and calcareous shales — and the upper, more calcareous Box Member. It is Late Devonian, Famennian, and it carries a fish fauna. It is emphatically not what you climb on; shale makes slopes, not crags. But the guidebook can say truthfully that this five-minute crag stands in the type area of a formation that geologists across the Southwest still map by name.

The climbing is on something much younger. The Hillsboro 7.5′ quadrangle (NMBGMR OFGM-242) reports that the Rubio Peak Formation — a thick middle-to-late Eocene sequence of andesitic to dacitic lava flows with interbedded volcaniclastic sediment — underlies every younger volcanic unit in this country. Above it come the Sugarlump Tuff, then the Kneeling Nun Tuff blown out of the Emory caldera in the Black Range to the west at around 35 Ma, then the Mimbres Peak Rhyolite up toward Kingston. The same quadrangle maps lacustrine sediment near the Percha Creek narrows and basalt flows south of the narrows — which is very likely where our one dissenting source, Sierra County’s tourism page, got “basalt.”

So the andesite-versus-basalt argument now has a shape: the crag is most likely cut in andesitic lava or volcaniclastic rock of the Eocene Rubio Peak Formation, with the mapped younger basalt south of the narrows as the live alternative that would vindicate the minority report. That is inference from regional mapping, not a map read at the crag; opening OFGM-242’s sheet would end the argument in an afternoon, and it is the single highest-value unread document behind this chapter.

The rock behaves like intermediate lava, which is the interesting part. Andesite sits between basalt and rhyolite in silica and viscosity, and it cools into blockier, less regular joints than basalt’s tidy hexagonal columns. That is exactly why this is the only crag in the county with real crack climbing, and why the cracks are what they are: dihedrals, thin corners and finger cracks rather than Indian Creek splitters — Nutcracker is described as an intimidating thin dihedral finishing up a long finger-crack corner, which is the fracture style intermediate lava gives you. The same jointing sheds blocks along joint faces, and everything that comes off lands in a willow-choked creek bottom where people belay. And because the crag is a shaded creek bottom under a bridge, expect lichen, slower drying than the desert limestone across the river, and a season that is the mirror image of Mud Mountain’s.

Approach & access

The recovered directions are now specific enough to name a road: park at the pullout just before the NM-152 bridge over Percha Creek, a few minutes past Hillsboro (a sign marks the old Percha Creek crossing), hop a rock wall, drop to the creek, and walk right a few hundred feet to routes on the east bank — call it five minutes door to rock. No GPS fix has surfaced yet, and NM-152 crosses more than one drainage on its way toward Kingston, so we are still not publishing this as a turn-by-turn to drive from cold — confirm the specific pullout locally before you go.

Access is the real issue here, not just the approach. Hopping a rock wall to reach a creek bottom means crossing somebody’s boundary, and route pages describe local climbers as currently working to obtain landowner permission — meaning the access question is open and active, not merely undocumented. Hillsboro is old mining country with a great deal of patented private ground threaded through the public land around it, and ownership at the crag itself — BLM, Gila National Forest, or private — is unconfirmed. Treat this as a place to ask locally before you climb, not a green light, and expect the answer to change as that permission effort plays out.

Season & history

No seasonal guidance survives in the record. Hillsboro sits well above TorC and the crag lies in a shaded creek bottom, so a longer season than the low-desert limestone — spring and fall in particular — is a reasonable guess, but only a guess. Development history, first ascents and even a rough route count are all unrecorded; whoever climbs here regularly out of Hillsboro or Kingston is the source worth finding.

Routes

Three route pages have surfaced, though none yet with a recorded grade.

Route	Grade	Stars	Notes
Pepe’s School of Beauty	—	—	Pending fieldwork.
The Bridge Troll	—	—	Pending fieldwork.
Rolling Stones Gather no Mas	—	—	Pending fieldwork.

The area page itself was never directly read; what we have beyond these three names is the phrase “mixed crack and bolted faces” and nothing more specific. Given the unresolved access question above, we would not send anyone to climb these until that is settled regardless of what this table eventually holds.