Joshua Tree

At 6 AM last Friday morning, Dan and I woke up ready for the 8 hour drive to Joshua Tree. We were hoping that the odd start time would allow us to avoid much of the weekend traffic in the city areas and getting into Joshua Tree itself (we also wanted to score a decent campsite in the park, and those are preciously hard to come by on a Friday night). There were no incidents on the way there, and we made pretty good time, despite numerous stops, at Carl’s Jr for lunch, WalMart for the requisite 2 gallons of water per person for the weekend (there’s no drinkable water in Joshua Tree, or any water at all, really), and the Five-Ten outlet in Redlands for some sweet deals on rock shoes (I got some brand new Huecos). We got to the park, situated at about 5,000 vertical feet amidst the Mojave desert, just before sunset. As luck would have it, we were able to find a smallish campsite in Hidden Valley, the most sought-after campground in the park, so we set up the 2-man tent Dan had brought and settled in.

Before it got too dark, we took a short walk to Saturday Night Live, a classic JTree V3 boulder problem. I worked on it some but wasn’t quite able to send the scary dyno. Meanwhile I got a pretty sweet picture of Ryan Mtn in the glow of the setting sun. [Awesome Friday Night Sunset] Night came (along with the freezing temperatures of a desert in winter), so we headed back to the campsite and fired up our camp stoves for some dinner and hot chocolate. Then it was early to bed; we wanted a good night’s rest to be prepared for the routes we were to climb the next day. I slept pretty well, bundled in many layers of clothing and my sleeping bag (which is supposedly rated down to 20 degrees).

We were up fairly early on Saturday, and made some good old oatmeal for breakfast. [Me cooking oatmeal on my camp stove] Then we headed out to Ryan Mtn (same as in the previous sunset picture) in order to climb Walk on the Wild Side, a sketchy, slabby, run-out, 3-pitch 5.8. It was a bit of a hike there, and the base belay point was a bit awkward, so it took us a while to get all our gear sorted out and ready to go. Eventually, Dan was ready and started the lead up the first pitch. It was a fairly hairy experience, and even though it was technically not too difficult, the climb was balancey and run-out, so one slip of the foot would send Dan falling 40 feet (though hopefully not all the way down). [Dan 2/3 of the way to the anchor point] He made it without falling of course, set up the belay from the first-pitch anchor, and I followed him. At some points I was pretty scared, because my strength is generally in power and not tricky technique, and also because I was climbing with a pack full of my rope, but 30 or 45 minutes later Dan and I were both dangling 120ft up from the belay, tied into an anchor. At that point we decided, since it was after lunch time, not to do the next two pitches, and so we rappelled down, got our gear together, and went back to the campsite for lunch. [View from the belay]

Our next project was to be a climb called Mental Physics, a super-long single-pitch 5.7⁺. This is a beautiful climb with a bit of everything–face climbing, crack climbing with fist jams and hand/foot jams, slab climbing, bomber trad placements and an amazing view at the top. Mental Physics is located in an area of the park called the Wonderland of Rocks, which exhibits so many geological oddities I’m not sure scientists have figured it out quite yet. If you were to picture giant babies playing with millions of boulders and just dropping them on the ground to form valleys and mazes, you might come close to picturing this location. Anyhow, the hike to Mental Physics didn’t follow a proper trail, but wound its way through these valleys and mazes of boulders–pure 4th class scrambling interspersed with cacti, basically. I was very glad to have some good and sticky trail shoes, because jumping from boulder to boulder would have been next to impossible without them.

Anyhow, we made it to the climb late afternoon and I set up the belay while Dan got out his trad gear (nuts, hexes, cams, and the like). [Picture of the climb while getting ready (the end of the crack is actually only about 2/3 of the way up)] Dan did an admirable job up the climb, placing gear every 6 to 10 feet, and eventually made it to the top. [Dan a ways up] At this point I could tell we needed to hurry a bit, since shadows were starting to work their way up the face as the sun was setting. So I tied in and started to work my way up the crack, taking Dan’s gear out and clipping it to my harness as I went along. With the length of the climb, however, and the trickiness of some of the segments, it probably took me a good 40 minutes to get to the summit, just in time to see the sun set behind the canyons of boulders.

We were starting to worry a bit, with the sun going down, and it getting a little colder, so we tied our ropes together and made to rappel down. Unfortunately, the ropes got tangled on a ledge 1/3 of the way down, and so we couldn’t continue the rappel (you might get stuck indefinitely if the ropes get caught). Moreover, it had become too dark to see the bottom clearly, which is a necessity for a safe rappel. Finally, the seriousness of the situation hit us: we were stuck 200ft off the ground, looking at a night on a rock completely exposed to the wind and cold (I think I already mentioned that temperatures drop below freezing at night in February) with only one long-sleeved layer apiece, and our water down at the belay. Of course, neither of us had kept our headlamps on us; if we had, we probably could have rappelled down still, or made easier the ordeal that followed.

It was then that the epic adventure truly began. Luckily (providentially), Dan recalled that there was a walk-down from the summit. Now, “walk-down” usually means an easy, no-climbing-required descent, but the route we eventually clambered down was anything but easy. Not only was it extremely steep and did it involve trusting holds which we couldn’t tell were safe, we soon realized that, without a moon, it was really dark. That’s right–new moon = no light. Anywhere else, for example sitting at a campsite, we might have been glad for the chance to see the stars that much clearer, but then I was just realizing that the stars are really only good for seeing, not for seeing by. Well, miraculously, we made it down to the other side of the mountain without accident, and took stock of our situation.

Things stood something like this: first, we were at least 45 minutes to an hour from our car if we followed the quickest and safest route back. Unfortunately, and as I noted before, there was no established “route”, so our chances of stumbling blindly back on the path we had made on the way there were close to nil. We had a general idea of which direction we needed to head, but since just about all the landmarks looked the same, we weren’t all that likely to actually find anything which could tell us if we were close to getting home or not. Second, we had no food or water, and had just got done with a longish climb. Third, we were weighed down with quite a few pounds of gear, and no easy way to carry it–we had all sorts of trad gear and quickdraws and such clipped to our harnesses, and had fashioned a self-carrying backpack out of each of our ropes. I hesitate to estimate, but all this could have weighed between 20 and 30 pounds. Fourth, the only footwear we had was our climbing shoes. Climbing shoes, of course, are not made for walking or hiking of any kind, as they are meant to contort the foot into an odd, tense shape which is beneficial for the technical moves required on the rock. Moreover, I was wearing the new Huecos I had bought, and one generally buys rock shoes a bit small, knowing that over the course of the next few weeks they will expand gradually to the desired size. Needless to say, my feet had already been in complete pain during the climb for solely this reason. Fifth, we were not prepared for cold weather at all, since we each had just one long-sleeved layer of clothing with which to face freezing temperatures. Sixth and finally, we had no light to see by, since we had foolishly left our headlamps in the car, and since the moon had decided to play hooky that evening.

Realizing all this, we had two options: we could either try to make it back to our car, taking our chances with the terrain and our senses of direction, or we could find a good place in which to huddle together and pass the night, hopefully not contracting hypothermia or the like. After deliberating we opted for the first choice, since we reasoned that at least moving over the difficult terrain would keep us from being cold and that, however long it took us, we would more than likely hit one of the park’s roads eventually, which we could follow back to our car. Then we had another decision to make: whether or not to try to find the base of the climb we had done, in order to retrieve all the gear we had left there. The positive results of such an endeavor would be that (a) we could put on our trail shoes and free ourselves of a good deal of pain hiking in climbing shoes, and (b) we could consolidate all our equipment into packs, which would be safer and more comfortable. Ultimately, however we decided that such benefits would not be worth the danger of both possibly wasting time and energy in a search that would be very difficult (since no features could be made out on the rock, so we would not know which segment of the mountain held our belay station), and injuring ourselves (since the scramble up to the belay had taken the utmost of care and concentration even in full daylight).

Decision made, we took our bearings via the constellations (and the trusty north star), and decided that a south-easterly course was best. We worked our way through the valleys as best we could, since the going was less dangerous there, but all the same it was by no means trivial. To emphasize how dark it was, I will say that it would have been impossible to see Dan, even when he was only 10 feet in front of me, had I not been looking out of the corner of my eye (where light sensitivity is greater) and had he not been wearing a glossy white helmet. This, combined with the necessity of climbing up and jumping/sliding down boulders, made for some very interesting leaps of faith as we at times committed ourselves to a downward slide on a boulder, hoping that the ground, or another boulder, would stop us soon. To make this matter worse, what we could make out in the night appeared to us at deceptive distances. A fall that looked like a manageable 3 feet would turn out to be 4, and my stomach would lurch for that last foot as I wondered if I had miscalculated even more. Or, what looked like a differently-colored patch of rock would turn out to be a shadow caused by a change in elevation, with obvious and painful consequences.

After about an hour of picking our way through one boulder-strewn valley, it became clear that it was turning us too far to the north, and that we would have to crest the hill to our right. This turned out to be far more difficult than anticipated, and during the climb (and increasingly thereafter) I became glad that I was wearing climbing shoes. Despite the constant pain in my feet (which I was sure would be permanently damaged), the shoes provided an extra level of safety on the rocks, which was an incredible boon given the dangerous scrambling and the layer of grit on the boulders which made traction hard to come by. Curiously, this grit appeared to be made of quartz and something else, because every time our shoes would slide against it at any decent pressure, we would see faint flashes of luminescence. Another annoying hindrance was the vegetation which was scattered throughout the boulders. Every scraggly dead plant seemed bent on snagging my rope or my gear, making my rope a tangled mess, and I could never tell whether that patch of desert flora in front of me was an innocuous shrub or a cactus. Moreover, sometimes, as I was sliding down a boulder or something similar, one of Dan’s hexes would get stuck in a crack in the boulder (just as it was designed to do, in fact), leaving me caught on the middle of the small slope while I tried to work the piece of gear free.

On the other hand, these distractions proved to be useful for exactly that–distracting me from the fact that I was wandering around at night in the desert with no water and, basically, working out. It would not have been good, I wager, for me to start thinking about being thirsty or about what being dehydrated feels like.

At any rate we made it to the top of this particular valley of rocks, and caught a glimpse of the only real landmark; a nasty pond of sorts which had seemed quite out of place in the desert on our way to Mental Physics now glimmered enticingly far beneath us, a breath of fresh air to our despairing bodies. With renewed energy we scrambled down the other side of the ridge into this new valley, and tried to guess where exactly we were on the circumference of the pond, eventually deciding we must be somewhere on the north-east. We remembered that there was one and only one fording place that would allow us to get from the north side of the pond to the south, and thereby to a trail we knew had to be over there. But a while spent searching the edges of the pond didn’t reveal any such ford to us, and after Dan stepped right into the curiously boggy pond thinking it was solid ground, we decided the search was fruitless and resolved to head east into another valley (we couldn’t just skirt the lake because of the sheer walls to the south).

Heartened that we were not going in completely the wrong direction, we entered the physically most challenging portion of the journey, as this particular wash seemed to have decidedly nasty boulders. After dragging ourselves a ways along it, it seemed to us that the ridge to the south was especially low, and that we might be able to climb up to it and take a survey of the surrounding land, to see if there were any car headlights that would alert us to the direction of a road. That decision turned out to be bad, since after some fairly technical scrambling, we were faced with a featureless slab climb to the top. I was too scared by it to attempt the climb, but Dan gave it a shot. He got about half way up when it became clear that it was too steep and too gritty for him to get safely to the top, or back down if he did (down-climbing, especially on slab, is always harder than the climb up). From there it was a risky bail for Dan, and he made his way back down as I prayed silently.

Since we had no real choice but to continue on in the direction we had been going, we managed our way back to the valley floor and pushed east, keeping our eyes open for another opportunity to move south over the ridge. Eventually we were forced to try this, whether we wanted or not, since the wash we had been following came to an end. Surprisingly, even though the ridge was higher here, it proved to be easier to feel a way up to the top than in our previous attempt. Dan made it up first, and said he was fairly sure he had seen some headlights far off, over another ridge. By the time I got up they were gone, however, and all I could see were dark walls of rock all around. At this point I was probably the most hopeless I had been all night, since, by our calculations, once we had crested this ridge, we would be looking into the valley where we would have been walking had we made it around the pond in the way we wanted. And that, of course, was supposed to contain a path which led out of the wonderland of rocks, through a brief section of open desert, and to the parking lot. More importantly, in the direction of the parking lot there was only desert–no rock formations. But as I looked around from my vantage point on the hill, it was just, I thought, valley wall after valley wall on all sides. So we must not have been, we thought, where we thought we were.

We went down into this new wash anyhow, though the going was difficult, because we knew (or hoped) that at some point if we went that direction we would run into the open desert, and that would be a good sight better than the damn wonderland of rocks. To our surprise and great delight, however, as soon as we were all the way down, we ran right into a trail! And not just any trail, but a real trail, made by the good folks at Joshua Tree National Park. We knew this because we saw one of those informational posts that tell you about desert life and whatnot. Ironically, when we read it by the light of Dan’s watch, it was about “water in the desert”. Yes, we know it’s hard to come by. Thanks.

Our spirits rose even higher as the trail we were on intersected an even larger trail going south; this one even had posts that delineated the sides of the trail. At this point we knew we were saved, because trails this good are only by parking lots. Minutes later (it seemed like bare seconds), our feet hit pavement, and we found ourselves in a parking lot. In fact, the very parking lot where Dan’s car was parked! So then, as I looked around, I realized that what I had taken, on the last ridge, to be a close-by rock formation blocking the way to the parking lot was actually Ryan Mtn, at least a mile off and distanced by the very open desert I had hoped to see, and would have seen, had not the darkness made all silhouettes appear at similar depths.

As soon as we stopped, weariness, thirst, pain, and cold all seemed to crash down at once. I was shivering uncontrollably, and couldn’t understand why I had not once felt cold during the ordeal. The first thing we did after making sure the car was indeed Dan’s was to offer up a prayer of thanks to God, whom we had been supplicating all along. Truly, it was near-miraculous, if not actually-miraculous, that neither of us was injured or hurt, despite the hundreds of opportunities for it. More astounding to us was the pathfinding sense which we felt we had been especially given, as it turns out we worked our way in more or less a straight line from the climb to the car (though this was not, unfortunately, the easiest way). Finally, we looked at our watches and learned that it had been over 3 hours since we first started down the back of Lenticular Rock (which Mental Physics was on). That’s 3 hours without a stop, a breather, or a mouthful of water. And somehow our bodies managed to perform at the high level we required. In sum, all the things we said or thought during that time could be divided into two groups: curses and prayers. I remember one plant in particular that seemed to be hell-bent on getting all my gear tangled in its thorns, and how I gave it such a verbal stream of four-letter words that I thought it should wither right there on the spot. It didn’t. The point is, of the two, it seems that the prayers were actually effective, and Dan and I were both overwhelmed with a feeling of being intentionally guided and spared.

From there we drove straight into town in search of food to ease our exhaustion. We passed by a Thai restaurant that had just closed, but I spoke with the proprietor, and they gladly let us eat all their leftovers for a nominal fee. It tasted amazing. We also ordered a round of Singha beer for a toast to our survival. At that point I was tempted to proclaim it the best beer I had ever tasted; that’s how giddy I was at being happily seated at a warm restaurant, alive. To finish the night, I received an entirely appropriate fortune in my fortune cookie, which, if we had followed its instructions, we would have been spared all our trouble. It read, “What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.” Clearly, we were fools to start that climb at the end of the day.

And so, Dan and I celebrated Valentine’s Day without so much as a lament over our singleness, which was, as I look back, quite a relief.

We went back to camp then and slept until dawn, when we woke up, put on our running shoes (still no trail shoes, remember), and drove back to the wonderland of rocks for the hike to Lenticular Rock. As we progressed on our way there, we recognized some of the places we had felt our way through the night before, and realized where exactly we took the harder routes. At one point, we were a mere 10 feet from the ford we were looking for to cross the pond. I also took a few pictures of some of the terrain we had walked blindly through. [This one] is a general picture of the wonderland of rocks area, actually taken from Lenticular Rock, and [this one] is a picture of the final ridge we worked our way down just before we stumbled onto the real trail. Well, we successfully retrieved our packs and shoes from the belay station, and went back to the car, even more freaked out about the night before, now that we had seen all the places we could have fallen and broken a leg, etc…

We thought about setting up and working on another big climb or two, but we were both feeling a little exhausted and not a little gun-shy, so instead we spent the remainder of the morning doing some bouldering. [Here] is a picture of a fun boulder near Cap Rock. Bouldering soon lost its appeal, though, since our hands had been rubbed completely raw during our scrambling the night before, so we headed back to the campsite for a chill afternoon of reading and sunning (the middle of the day was actually quite nice). I took a neat panorama shot of Hidden Valley, where our campground was located, from the top of a nearby rock. [Panorama–our tent is hidden in the left 1/4]

After that, our trip was pretty much over, since I was scheduled to leave early the next morning with Dan’s car and drive back to Stanford, while Dan stayed on another day and climbed with a friend from Orange County. I did, however, catch a cool sunset on our way to get some pizza for dinner (at Sam’s Pizza and Indian Food, if you can believe that). [Sunset 1] and [Sunset 2]

I woke up the next morning at 5 AM in order to beat the holiday traffic and took Dan’s green Civic, armed with what I hoped were good memories of directions, CDs, water, and trail mix. And those were, in fact, my constant companions on the drive home, which I made in a record 6.5 hours (that’s 500 miles!). Yes, that is an average speed of 77 MPH. I love I-5. And thus ended my weekend adventures, unless you want to hear how bad I smelled after not showering for over 3 days, and after wearing the exact same clothes every day (even after our ordeal). In case you also wanted to know about that, I wore my awesome CoolMax shirt from Target, on top of which I added a really stylish Pedro shirt my brother made for me (worn, in fact, in his memory, since that studly climber is stuck in Florida and couldn’t make it to Joshua Tree).

Needless to say, I have increased the level of respect I plan to have for outdoor activites and Nature in general, and will therefore do my best to never again get stuck in Joshua Tree at night in the winter with no water and no light. Finally, know that my camp stove is awesome.