First, a note from your authors:
Those of you who have been following along on our Journey, Thank You for the support and a thousand apologies for the long silence. We've been "resting" with family for the holidays which is almost as hectic as life on the open road. We're just now taking a little time for ourselves and catching up on the blog. So without further delay, we take a trip now, back in time, to the beautiful sunny southwest where we last saw our intrepid heroes departing from San Diego, headed for Joshua Tree National Park...
And we actually made it too. We pulled in the very same night we left, thanks to Chelsea's determination and driving prowess. She found us a trailhead in the park that is supposed to be for backcountry campers to leave their vehicles while they strike out into the wilderness. We interpreted the rules in a way that left us perfectly within the realm of legality to sleep right there in the parking lot as long as we filled out a little backcountry camping permit (usually attached to a tent-pole or pack) but in this case strung from our rear view mirror.
We awoke to a parking lot of chattering professional looking (i.e. they had huge amounts of gear including radio-collar tracking antennae and the like) scientists or amateur naturalists about to embark en search of antelope or ferrets or whatever animal was out there beeping like a mooring buoy in the distance. We gave em the ol' "don't mind us, we're just normal humans crawling out of our truck bed in our underwear" treatment and they decided the radio antenna was adamant that they leave that very moment.
Chelsea took about 5 minutes to find a 5 star hike on The Outbound within a few miles of where we were and after I heartily agreed on the destination so she drove there while I crawled back into bed for another 15 minutes of sleep. One of the manifold perks of bringing your bed with you to the trailhead.
I rolled out of bed into the kitchen counter (read: tailgate) and Chels and I cooked up some kind of big ass breakfast we had half-prepped the night before. We were in no hurry so we stood around the parking lot watching people arrive. We were the first there, and as the sun moved a few degrees higher a handful of cars trickled in. The one that caught my eye was a blocky Tacoma with a shiny black Snugtop, Thule roof racks looking like ice axes strung from the webbing loops on a frame-pack. We saw it pass us into the entrance of the lot and I tracked it from right to left as it pulled by before turning back to my bacon. In a few minutes when the hashbrowns were being flipped I heard a "Hey there!" and turned to find the Tacoma driver hailing us from an adjacent parking spot.
I can't recall my exact first visual of him but in my mind's eye, he's squatting and checking to see if we have a skid plate and lift kit or standing, nodding his head quickly up and down mouthing "Alright, alright, nice. Yeah." He was an engaging sort of guy who asked us a few leading questions to identify us as students of the road, and therefore, colleagues. He too, was a fellow traveler and had, he announced, seen we had the "same-basic" rig as his. I invited him over to see the details and he happily hurried over. "Alright, alright...nice yeah." We did a circuit of Sherpa and then one of his rig together. "See, I've got the 2016." he spelled out for us. "Other than that, same-basic thing." He did in fact have a 2016 Tacoma, which is a remarkable truck. It looks to me like it's trying a little too hard to look "Built Ford Tough" or like every one is supposed to be special extra badass edition or something but that's just personal aesthetics. His Snugtop was also nearly identical to ours, with only a few minor differences like the odd bulging flange it needed to accommodate the absurdly thick tailgate. The overall effect was an overbite on the topper door. But again, we're just talking aesthetics. We're thrilled to have run into this guy and seen his setup was so similar to ours.
After our chat, we finished breakfast and hit the trail, hiking a few easy miles up into the barren hills and down into a little valley where we caught our first glimpse of green. Our destination on this hike was "49 Palms Oasis," an interesting trick of the local geology where the aquifer makes contact with the surface of the sandy ground allowing moisture enough to support a few thick clusters of California Fan Palms and an undergrowth of low-lying palms, yucca and agave. Neither one of us had seen a real desert oasis before so the stark contrast of the lush vegetation against the bare grey monzogranite and dark sand was astonishing. We sat for a long time on various outcrops and high perches around the oasis talking about the fire scars on the trunks, what animals might frequent the area, and the carrying capacity of the little ecosystem, wondering if a person (or two specific persons) could survive there on their own if uninterrupted.
After an indeterminate time, we decided we should probably set out to see some Joshua Trees so we headed back to the truck as the day got warmer and muggier under overcast skies. After consulting our park map, we were stumped when we found there was no obvious area in the park with a circle or something "Here Be Joshua Trees." Ever resourceful, Chelsea navigated me to the main welcome center where the rangers laughed at our "So where do we find these 'Joshua Trees'?" but gave us some really great beta (that's route advice in climber-speak) on where to explore. They also showed us where to fill up on water and we took a few minutes to wash all of our dishes in the empty restrooms, moving quick to get them done before anyone could tell us we weren't supposed to.
Now, with our bottles filled and maps on our dash, we dove into the park proper. Our fist must-see was Geology Tour Road, an unpaved 4x4 loop with conveniently placed overlooks to allow for the most educational sightseeing. We had a choose your own adventure style packet with information relating to each one of these overlooks, so we pulled over at each marker and taught each other about the ins and outs of perpendicular joint sets, basalt dikes, apatite veins, and 1.7 billion year old gneiss. Nice.
Sherpa handled the rough road with ease, and though I'd have liked to go looking for more difficult roads to explore, the sun was sinking and we needed to think about where to camp. Chels pulled out the map of every campground in the park and we drove to and through every one, looking for an open site. This survey of the park was interesting because we got a pretty accurate census of the park inhabitants. Large RVs and trailers aren't allowed in campsites, but we still saw plenty of medium sized ones. The usual, or perhaps slightly more big family sized tents were strewn about with a typical minority of little single person backpacking tents carefully positioned in their empty looking campsites. What surprised us was the huge number of dirtbag climbers living out of their pickups, small SUVs, and vans. These people are our kin, so they're always easy for us to spot and "J-Tree," as they call it, is a mecca for the sport. I'm confident we saw more climbers in J-tree than we did in Yosemite, but I'm sure weather was responsible for that (and the fact that we skipped Camp 4, the traditional home of climbers of all types in Yosemite).
During our census of the park campsites, we did get a little distracted at a place called "Hall of Horrors" a sweet little crag right off of a main park thoroughfare. We made a detour to circumnavigate the huge mound of granite and talk about getting into trad climbing some day when we can afford the gear. Gear or no gear, we scrambled and smeared our way up into a few easy cracks and onto some tame-looking boulders just to get a feel for the rock. By now the sun had given up on the sky and was burrowing into the hills to the southwest and we really really thought it was time to find a place to camp. We decided to try one more campsite appropriately called Jumbo Rocks, and we were stoked to find it only half full. We picked out a spot, then switched to another spot, then got the little manila envelope one uses to deposit the payment for the site.
Somehow, we got to talking about dinner and what to do next and we up and decided to buy food and hit the road. In retrospect this choice doesn't make a ton or even a kilo of sense. Why look all evening for a campsite just to find one and drive away? Why not spend another night in this beautiful park? Why continue to drive and navigate and push when we could just relax? The truthful answer is sometimes we just don't do the sensible thing. This is one of the themes of The Trip, I think. We, as humans are just weirdly irrational sometimes. We do things in the spur of the moment and try to make sense of it later. We convince ourselves and one another of the silliest things. We make split second decisions that ripple out and affect the rest of our lives. And the scary part is, we usually don't notice. This trip, for Chelsea and I, is partly about realizing the enormity of every little choice we make to ourselves, and simultaneously how minuscule and irrelevant that choice is to the world at large. As The Road stretches out further and further behind me, the importance of the phrase, Think about what You are Doing. multiplies for me and becomes closer to a mantra every day.
Whether or not I/we were thinking about what we were doing that night, we drove off into the twilight to find a grocery store because I wanted some bratwurst. We may have been planning to retrieve said bratwurst and firewood before returning to Jumbo Rocks at this point, I'm not sure. The only store still open in town was one of these little park town convenience marts that sells only foods with a shelf life of a year or more. Canned meats, Xtra Large Noodle Bowls, and liquor in every conceivable form abound while things like fresh brats do not. I stood at the PEPSI fridge with one shelf of bottle holders removed and replaced with a flat shelf holding bologna, hot dogs, and kielbasa sausage. The dogs were Bar-S and crushed flat on one side, making them look a little like fat fleshy butter knives. The kielbasa was "Fully Cooked!" of the type that is extra long and coiled like a lazy snake or a meaty horseshoe. I went with the kielbasa.
I trudged back to Sherpa and my dirt-baguette humming "I love you baby, but all I can think about is..." "Kielbasa sausage?" she asks? "It's all they had." I lie, not wanting to explain about the poor mangled hot dogs. Chelsea showed me what she had found while I was shopping, public lands called "Sheephole National Wilderness" just adjacent to the Joshua Tree border. We agreed to drive there and make ourselves the much delayed campfire dinner I had been dreaming of. Sheephole Wilderness is about as featureless a place as they come, as much as we could tell in the pitch black, so rather than looking for a scenic or sheltered campfire spot, our main concern was finding a spot where the road widens enough to pull off safely. By now it was blacker than a dark steer's tuchus on a moonless night so we used our red-lights and the headlights of the lonely passing semis to find firewood and a spot to cook. We found a surprising amount of old brittle lumber, which led us to believe we were in a drainage or floodplain and discussed the flash flood escape plan, namely beg Tenzing Norgay to save us, since we couldn't see any ground that was even slightly higher than what we were standing on in the dark. As a final precaution, I hastily grabbed some roadside rocks to ring our fire and flicked my Bic into the tinder.
It is terrifying how fast things burn in the desert. For folks who had just recently been on the Olympic Peninsula, fanning and blowing and carefully stripping the wet bark off of carefully selected kindling, only to have a sickly little flame, this blaze in the sand was startling. All of our wood here had been baked by the sun for months or years and was completely desiccated. Coupled with a strong cross-wind, we had a tongue of flame licking out of our pit in no time, and though we added no more than an ounce or two of wood at a time, we had plenty of heat to cook on. The only trouble was, it stunk! "Is any of this wood painted?" Chelsea wondered, while I tried to look for glue, or any signs of chemical treatment on our lumber. "It smells like burning rubber," I agreed. As the words came out of my mouth I had the realization of what we were sitting around, a big ring of asphalt. I howled my frustration into the night while quickly poking the soggy melting blocks of roadway out if the heat.
We ate the nasty sausages and wrinkled our noses while staring into the dying embers of our fire. It was pretty funny after all, and while we were dejected by the quality of the meal and the fire, we knew it was the sort of mistake we'd only make once. Another mistake that night was that I had chivalrously bought Chelsea a big can of coke to cheer her up, but had inadvertently caffeinated her to the eyeballs. So, once our fire was triple doused, she decided she'd rather keep driving than roll around trying in vain to sleep. I fell into the instant untroubled sleep of the exhausted or innocent (three guesses to which one I am) and woke up only once, in a truly weird place. Somewhere, in Eastern California or Western Arizona, there sits a telephone pole at a crossroads. Sometime, in the distant past, someone attached a homemade sign declaring the nearest town to be something or other at a distance of X miles away. Then some joker added an arrow saying "Sacramento 463 miles" which is definitely not the closest city. Then some friendly folks added directions to their houses right down the road, and so forth. Now, there exists a pole with 60 feet of handmade signage, notes, declarations, and decorations standing alone in the desert. This is the type of weirdness we were out here looking for, but of course my groggy ass didn't even think of taking a photo. Life's funny like that I guess, if you want to see it for yourself, you'll have to go looking for it.
Eventually, we found some BLM land and finally retired for the night. It was the longest day of the trip and a truly wild ride. We hope to have many more like it. And while done with Joshua Tree, we weren't done with the desert yet. The next day, we slept in and hit the road late, headed to Lake Havasu City, AZ. We came to see our friend from college, Attie, and had the added bonus of "meeting" her roommate, another IU alum we knew from years ago.
The first thing we did in LHC was hit up a grocery store for some supplies, but we couldn't even make it in the door without doing some sightseeing. This place is in sunny Arizona, which means senior central. The parking spaces were double wide, with shaded awnings for each row, and even so, the place was a shitshow. Old folk were rolling in every minute, screeching to a stop, pulling in at 45 degree angles and occupying every inch of the double wide spots. H3 Hummers, FJ Cruisers, convertible sports cars, and handicap accessible vans littered the lot and the inside of the store was just as crowded with scooters, power chairs, and mobility devices. We got our doughnuts, had some laughs and got out of there before we got run over.
Attie's place was a sanctuary for us. She had thoughtfully told us where to park, how to get in, and left a note with the wifi password and details on the laundry, shower for us, and bag of delicious cookies on the counter. This was excellent! So many times in the last months we had been lost and confused trying to get with the program in various people's residencies, having a host with a little forethought was great. I also managed to scare the shit out of her by being posed up on the couch in my boxers when she walked in for lunch, totally unaware her visitors had arrived. I wish I had the foresight to take a photo of her face when she found out she wasn't alone in her living room, but alas, photography isn't my strong suit. This also explains my failure to take a snapshot of the triple parked H3 at the grocery store...
We had a few days with Attie, which were spent exploring the friendly senior laden lakeside, chilling with drinks in the deserted residential pool/hot tub, and meeting her local friends. Most notably, we took a walk across London Bridge. Yes, ye olde London Bridge. Apparently, when the Capitol of Great Britain renovates its public works, it auctions off the dilapidated fixtures to the highest bidder. In 1967, Robert P. McCulloch, the founder of Lake Havasu City, decided it would be the perfect hood ornament for his newly founded city on Lake Havasu and block by block had the bridge re-assembled until its completion in 1971. The monumental effort required to dismantle, ship, and reassemble 930 feet of masonry halfway around the globe astounds me, more so because it elicits a mere "huh" or "that's neat" from most visitors. I stood on the center span of the bridge, surrounded and supported by tons upon tons of rock and mortar that simply did not belong here and wanted to scream myself hoarse about how preposterous my species is. But it's neat. I get it.
Once our time in LHC was up, we loaded up again in what was now becoming a very familiar process. We piled into our truck which is our home, yet again, and steered ourselves onto the highway. I was so comfortable with the familiarity of it all, and the distraction of asking Chelsea one more time, what she thought of our last stop and where we thought we'd end up next that I just nonchalantly drove us off into the middle of fucking nowhere. Seriously, I barely saw the road in front of me or paid any attention to the signs and by the time I came to, we were so far from anywhere it's hard to imagine we were just somewhere earlier that day. I pulled up the ol' satellite navigation at this point and pointed us toward Thanksgiving in Colorado, our next surefire destination.
Goggle told me to pull a U-turn and get off the interstate ASAP and I considered it a minor success that I had a clear milestone ahead of us to aim for, Las Vegas. Little did I know, the detour I accidentally caused brought us off of the main road and right onto historic Route 66. We followed this two lane blacktop all the way to Vegas, not seeing or stopping at any kind of tourist trap or gift shop but getting, what I like to think was the real, authentic route 66 experience. At one point I actually, literally, splattered the guts out of a bigass scorpion crossing the road and nearly couldn't contain myself. I swore it was a Deathstalker before I did some googling and realized they only live in Africa, and now think it was probably a Hadrurus arizonensis, which has the cute common name, giant hairy desert scorpion. Either freakin' way, I accidentally squished a big ol' scorpion on Route 66 and now I can die a happy man.
We eventually got to Vegas, and therefore back on track to Colorado. At this point we had already decided to skip Phoenix and our other pre-thanksgiving stops because we were just weary of the road and ready to be back someplace like home. We had been aching for a little downtime and while we had plenty of 5-star hosts, it's just not the same as being somewhere we felt truly comfortable. For that, we needed the Front Range. So we wasted no time in crummy Vegas, or the rest of Nevada and only stopped in Utah once we could smell the Rocky Mountain Pines. After a quick overnight in a deserted scenic overlook off of I-70 in Utah, we jumped back into the cab and rejoiced upon crossing the border, back home again, in colorful Colorado. In our next post, we'll be having Friendsgiving in Boulder, beers in Foco, and hiking in the ever-lovely Rocky Mountain National Park. Till then,
See You On The Road.