Nopah Peak

Nopah Peak is the highest named mountain in the Nopah Range, a mountain range in Inyo County, California, in the Mojave Desert just west of the state border with Nevada. The peak has an elevation of 6365 ft and a topographic prominence of 628 ft. It boasts steep escarpments to both east and west, rising more than 3000 ft in approximately 0.75 miles from the desert floor of Chicago Valley to the west and a drop-off almost as steep to the east.

While Nopah Peak is the highest named peak in the Nopah Range, the true high point of the range is a point approximately 9 ft higher and less than 1 mile south of Nopah Peak. This Nopah Range high point often sees more peak-bagger traffic and attention than Nopah Peak itself, because of its prominence: at 3565 ft, it is the 27th most-prominent summit in California, and thus included on the Sierra Club Desert Peaks Section (DPS), a list of noteworthy desert peaks.

Nopah Peak and most of the Nopah Range lie within the Nopah Range Wilderness, administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). They also form part of the Basin and Range Province, along with neighboring mountains and ranges, such as the Resting Spring Range to the northwest on the other side of Chicago Valley, and the Kingston Range to the southeast.

Naming
The origin of the name "Nopah" is not entirely clear. It may be taken from pah, a generic Shoshoni word for water which appears in names elsewhere in the Great Basin region (such as Tonopah and Ivanpah). Gustav Gudde suggests in his California Place Names that the name may have been a hybrid name created by surveyors to indicate no water was to be found there (Nopah→No pah).