Welcome to the New Mexico section of Mountain Project!
The contributions that are made to this site are greatly appreciated; this site is made up of an awesome community of users that make the site what it is.
Although there is very little information regarding “rules” for submitting climbing areas and routes to this site, the New Mexico Administers all agree that the following guidelines may be helpful to truly make this site go “Beyond the Guidebook”.
1) Don’t be a jerk (this one states the obvious). 2) Route and area submissions should truly be helpful to those out climbing. Before posting, you should have some first hand experience actually climbing the route. This always results in a much more useful description. 3) Please, please, please… Don’t copy route descriptions directly out of guidebooks, online publications, etc. This is plagiarism! Remember, BEYOND the guidebook! 4) Please use the spell check and make an effort to use correct grammar.
Again, the Mountainproject community truly appreciates the efforts taken to make good route descriptions. If you feel that a route or area description is not up to standard, a brief email to one of the area admins for suggestions on improvement will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for taking the time to make the New Mexico section of Mountain Project quality! We look forward to seeing you out there!
Description
The Mexican Breakfast formation is a relatively minor formation ~160' tall, located just in front of and below the big west face of Torreon. It would probably be forgotten amongst the larger formations in the Sandias were it not for the striking 10' horizontal roof midway up it, and its clean cracks. The formation's namesake route, Mexican Breakfast Crack, is a Sandia classic.
The crag faces southwest, and is therefore shaded until the afternoon.
A logical enchainment is to do a climb on Mexican Breakfast Formation followed by one on Torreon, to get max climbing with minimal hiking.
Getting There
A couple of options for the approach to Mexican Breakfast formation. The fastest option is to follow the Torreon approach, which leads you to the top of the Mexican Breakfast formation. [To get to Torreon, go down the Crest Spur trail to the first switchback, and take a faint trail heading north through the forest, and after around 100 or so yards begin looking for a 4th class descent through the limestone (this is just before a dead tree you'd need to step over or under gets in the way). After this downclimb, the trail kind of disappears, but go down staying on the ridge as best as possible. You might come to a collapsed log building in a flatter area. Go north from here and drop in the 2nd gully, which has a striking greenish-yellow arete/corner. Soon you'll be at the base of the cliff, follow this north to reach the base of Torreon and top of Mexican Breakfast. You can also reach this same place going down the Sentinel approach gully. This page has another written description for the Torreon approach.] From the base of Torreon, the granite tip that doesn't look like much just to the west is the top of Mexican Breakfast formation. Scramble down on talus to either side to reach the base. Should take ~40 minutes or so.
A slower approach but with almost no risk of getting lost is to hike down the La Luz to below The Thumb. At the switchback where the La Luz trail gets near to the drainage in the middle of La Cueva canyon, start to veer over up through thin forest to the formation. This has the advantage that you can pick out the formation and know about where you're headed, but takes about an hour to get to the base.
Getting Back
After completing climbs on this cliff, hiking out the Torreon approach gully probably won't be appealling. The most fun thing to do would be to continue up one of the Torreon climbs- if you're doing this, don't bring a big pack you don't want to climb with. An alternative is to head down the talus and through the trees to the La Luz, and hike up the relatively gentle grade of the La Luz Trail (at least, gentle grade compared to steep gully alternative).
Mexican Breakfast Crack is a high quality and clean crack with a wild crux traverse under a big roof, although much of the climb is somewhat widish, as with parts of English Breakfast Crack in Yosemite. Certainly, trad climbers in both NM and California gobble up wide cracks for breakfast!Follow the clean left-facing corner under the right side of the big roof as it widens from big-hands to fist to offwidth. Sustained 5.8 to this point, but since there's...[more]
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