Nevada’s highest peak often overlooked
Boundary Peak at 13,140 feet is Nevada’s highest point. Photo/Michelle Slaton/U.S. Forest Service
By Henry Brean, Las Vegas Review-Journal
If beauty played a role in deciding Nevada’s highest point, Wheeler Peak, crown jewel of Great Basin National Park at the eastern edge of the state, would be the winner hands down.
Instead, geography and topography have conspired to give us Boundary Peak on the state’s opposite border — a nondescript, scree-covered bump at the end of California that rises, nevertheless, about 77 feet higher than picturesque Wheeler.
By some estimates, 13,140-foot Boundary is barely even a peak. A website for climbers called summitpost.org describes it is as “part of a twin peak with Montgomery Peak,” which is 301 feet higher and just across the border in California. If you keep going south from there, you’ll come to even taller Mount Dubois (13,559) and taller still White Mountain Peak (14,246), also completely in California.
“Boundary Peak is at the Northern end of the White Mountains,” writes summitpost.org, “and would not be climbed much except for the fact it is the highest point in Nevada, although it is not the highest peak in the area.”