Another long awaited (or dreaded) tale of the adventures of the twenty-nine palms gypsies…
Turtle Rock, 2009. We had wanted to climb some of the longer climbs on this feature. There apparently is no rap route, so it’s a walk-off. The guidebook recommends that it’s probably in your best interests to become familiar with this prior to any ascent; the implication being that it is complicated, and could be dangerous if you don’t. We took this at face value and thus we spent the first part of the day trying to suss out the sketchy descent. This, whilst providing some enjoyable, and entertaining exercise, proved fruitless as we could find no easy access to the summit.
No mind however. There were some other options available. We found a couple of nice single pitch climbs that had rap chains set on them. This turned out to be really fun stuff.
The first climb had great climbing over interesting features.
While Caleb and Kevin were finishing off the last climb, Renee and I were making the acquaintance of a young Glaswegian lass who was plying her dirtbag skills in the area. You may recall that our little band was being shadowed by that old trickster coyote. Today was no exception; he was still keeping a watchful eye on us, as we were chatting with our new friend.
For the second half of the day we moved away from the main area and from other people and wandered aimlessly amongst the many boulders and formations, trying and climbing lots of problems; some named, some not. We hung out for a time underneath the aptly named So High. What a fine looking problem. John Bachar did the FA. Of course he did…
I couldn’t even pull the start move, even with standing on the (official) cheater stone. I guess it’s (only) V5 using the stone; but transforms into a whopping V11 by doing a sit start. Not a chance.
What a special day this turned out to be. Beautiful climbs with soft sandy landings. Bluebird sky. Crisp dry desert air. Hunting Power. Blending with Gravity. And…Magic.
Back in camp at the end of the day Kevin was our appointed master fire-smith. He quickly got a tidy blaze going that helped warm the mind; but this night the blaze could not seem to cut through the bitter desert cold to warm our bodies. It was seeping into us from both the air and ground and there was no escape. I’ve spent colder nights in the desert, but I can’t really remember when. The wind continued to pick up overnight and by morning had whipped our little camp into disarray. Cold and bleary eyed we slowly emerged from our frosty down cocoons to greet the harsh pre-dawn.
The cold weather notwithstanding, we could have stayed in Joshua Tree indefinitely; it’s that kind of place. Unfortunately we only had two more days left to us before we all had to return to the reality of the workaday world. I proposed a spur of the moment idea that was met with unanimous acceptance. Why not drive back to Las Vegas and spend our last day climbing at Red Rocks? Neither Caleb nor Kevin had ever climbed there before, nor on sandstone either.
To be continued…
Joshua Tree is the poor man’s Patagonia
It is a raw, windy place,
but also a winter sanctuary for dirtbags,
the old school rock jocks
who’d drop acid on Wednesday nights
and run wide-eyed through the yuccas
– John Long