Taking the kids to Joshua Tree

Jan. 2, 2010

You have to love holiday weekends, not only did I get to go out and play 2 days in a row, my youngest asked me to take her and her special friend, Andrew out to Joshua Tree for the day. Whenever any of my children ask to go with OLD Dad, I do whatever it takes to accommodate them. It's a rare treat for me and it's fun to embarrass them in public. Since Andrew had never been to Joshua Tree before, we started out with the hike to the Wall Street Mill, it has a lot of interesting things in a relatively short distance.

Here is Roy at the trail head, he has decided to be the official tour guide.

As we start out on the trail, Roy gives us some words of wisdom, I think he said something like don't pet the cactus. He might have also given us such pearls as "don't die" and "drink everyone else's water first". I don't remember them all.

Our first stop was an old ranch house, I suspect it may have belonged to Worth Bagley, but the rockclimbers call it Uncle Willy's Healthfood Store.
Here is a close up view of some of the home built bricks, a mix of adobe with a very minimal amount cement added. They just don't build them like they used to.

Next, we moseyed over to this old truck. Charlene really liked it, she said she could reach the pedals. I really don't think she liked it for it's ergonomics as much as for it's classic styling.

On down the trail, an old road we come upon this old windmill. It was used by the ranchers to provide water to the cattle. This little valley is somewhat round and has a solid basin of bedrock that has been filled in with sand. It has a nice little aquifer that the old ranchers took advantage of.

The turning of the windmill caused the pump handle to go up and down, pumping the water to the surface where it would fill a storage tank that feed a water trough for the cattle. Andrew and Roy are checking to see how much work it would take for them to fix it with the bailing wire and chewing gum they brought along.

We don't always understand what Roy is up to. We can see it's about three inches though. He claimed to be trying to remove trash from the park, something about a balloon in the tree or something.

As anyone familiar with the area knows, Worth Bagley moved to this location, thanks to an altercation with William Keyes. Just a word of advice, if you have a choice between a rifle and a revolver, choose the rifle unless you're very close.

Andrew and Charlene, looking at the grave site. I don't think they're taking this seriously enough.

The kids thought they might be in the market for an aluminum Caddy, there were only 6 built.

We finally made it over to the stamp mill. In the foreground you can see some stamps on the table. Behind them you can see the box where the ore was crushed. The ore was pulverized into a fine powder, then it was spread on the table in a thin layer and mixed with mercury. The mercury mixture was then heated in ceramic cups which caused the heavy metals to separate from the rest of the mixture. The gold, silver or whatever they were mining was then easy to collect. They would try to reclaim the mercury, although not nearly as well as the EPA would have liked and start all over again.

From the Wall Street Mill, we headed east to check out some of the mining areas. Even if we don't find gold in them thar hills, we get some great views.

Did I mention that I liked the views?

Towards the end of the day, we decided it was time for "something completely different". We headed over to Intersection Rock and were just in time to see a couple climbing Overhang Bypass. Of course we're not just looky loos, we were on our way up to introduce Andrew to rockclimbing. We went around the corner to the left for something a little less spectacular.

Charlene, always one to make the most of the situation found a great little escape from the wind.

I led the climb, Right Ski Track 5.3 and then brought up Andrew and Charlene. Here is Charlene on the finish to the climb. Since I was doing the belaying, credit for this shot goes to Andrew.

Note how close the road and parking lot are, needless to say it's easy to get spoiled by the approaches to the climbs in Joshua Tree.

Andrew is just starting the rappel back down to the start of the climb. By this time the sun is going down and the wind has picked up. I was getting cold, but not as cold as Andrew, he had suffered frostbite on his face and this smile was frozen in place. Soon we were all back down on the ground and headed for home in the nice warmth of the car. I don't know how soon the kids are going to want to go out with OLD Dad, because they had a full day this day. Hey kids, thanks for coming!

A Day at Joshua Tree

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.