Yesterday I went on another little adventure. This time it was to Joshua Tree National Park with my buddy Roy. We did a little rock climbing, very little, some bouldering and then went for a hike.
We started out with a quick climb on the Right Ski Track route on Intersection Rock. This climb is fun and not very challenging, great for a warm-up. Of course, the chance to rappel is always fun too. I've attached a short video of Roy rappelling off the climb. It was a windy day so beware of the wind noise in the videos.
One of the other distractions of our day was playing with our small video cameras. We found out too late that the helmet camera was out of memory, so we carried it along for nothing.
After we came down off our largest climb for the day, we played on some boulders. The first is a popular friction climb near Intersection Rock. We decided that due to the difficulty and height of the boulder, we didn't want to go to the top. I've included a video of the foot work on the start of the climb, highlighting the friction footwork required for this type of climbing.
Bouldering differs from traditional rockclimbing in that it is the climber testing himself against the climb, normally no rope is used, maybe you'll have something or someone to break your fall, but it's considered a very "pure" form of climbing, where you don't have any distractions from things such as equipment. Of course, if you get distracted by the consequences of a fall, you may loose concentration and motivation, which is what happened to us. Some may call it the fear factor and they'd be correct, we got scared of taking a fall and getting injured.
We tried some other boulders and found some that were within our capabilities, so for my last video, I've included one titled the "Big boulder", don't worry, only my pride was hurt during the fall at the beginning. This boulder is about 20 feet tall and gets easier the higher up you go.
By this time it was about noon and getting warm, so we decided it was getting too hot to climb and we decided to go hiking. I am a dedicated fan of Hal Summer's HIKE EVERY DAY
and he recently hiked in Joshua Tree to a location called Samuelson's Rocks.
What made the hike interesting was that the only information I had was from Hal's blog. He took the hike on April 27 if you'd like to read his story about the rocks. I should have done some more research and reading about the location, but I tend to like to wander in the wilderness, as Hal did on his first attempt.
My partner on the hike, Roy is normally a good sport for my off the wall ideas, but this one pushed his tolerance to the limit. We started off from Quail Springs parking area and started walking to where I guessed the rocks would be located. We made a large circular hike along the base of the mountains and saw some potential hikes to go back and explore. We found the pump house and remains of an old homestead. After several hours of hiking, getting low on water and becoming discouraged, we found the site.
We spend about 20 to 30 minutes combing the site, not too throughly because we found 5 of the inscribed rocks and I understand that there are 8, so I guess I'll have to go back. There were still some beautiful flowers, but they are going fast.
The hike back was a real grind, I always know it's bad when Roy gives me his keys, I of course did the decent thing and told him that he's been a great friend all these years and that I would send help for him as soon as I was recovered. I'm not sure he appreciated the deep heartfelt emotion I was pouring out and he stepped up his pace and arrived back at the same time as me. You can see him smile that he made it back alive. Elapsed hike time, 4 hours.
We opened up the ice chest and had cold drinks and juicy oranges, that enabled us to recover enough to head back to town. Roy then forced me to drink an icy frappuccino, I felt so weak to have given in so easily. I'll try to be stronger next time. Note to self, if it's too hot to climb, it's probably too hot to hike.
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