Tuscon, Arizona: a NH pilgrimage to the desert

Tuscon became part of the trip because two of our friends (former NH-ites) were getting married there. They and another climbing friend from NH had moved to Tuscon within the past couple of years, so this was a nice chance to visit and catch up. The wedding drew quite a NH crowd! I think there were 18 of us total, plus the 3 who now live there. It was so much fun to see everyone again, have a chance to hang out and climb together and enjoy the beautiful Tuscon weather. We arrived at our friend James’ house late Wednesday night, with the wedding on Saturday. Unbeknownst to us, there was a bachelor party happening all day and night on Thursday, so Mike joined the boys for their festivities and I hung out enjoying a soft couch and bad TV for the first time in a good long while! We climbed at Mt. Lemmon on Friday (just a few miles outside of town) with a few folks, explored downtown Tuscon on Saturday during the day, then went to the wedding in the evening. The wedding was at a beautiful historic inn on the edge of town, the ceremony was in a little enclosed garden and the reception inside. Lots of great food and dancing!

Sunday we were all invited to Jeremy & Laura’s house (the newlyweds) for a little after-wedding gathering. It was a perfect time, relaxing, good conversation and marveling at the downpour outside! Couldn’t believe we were having yet another precipitation experience in the desert. The next day the 10 of us who were left drove to a climbing area about an hour away. The weather was, well, surprising. Snow flurries off and on all day….no joke! We managed to have a great day despite the chill. We climbed again at Mt. Lemmon on Tuesday with a slightly diminished group as people gradually left for home. Great weather, sunny and hot and hard to believe we were wearing hats and down coats just 24 hours before. We’d been planning to leave on Tuesday, but as folks from home kept extending their stay we couldn’t resist staying a little longer! Unfortunately I caught a bad cold, so I spent a day on the couch recuperating while everyone else climbed. Oh well, it was bound to happen eventually. We finally managed to get back on the road on Friday to start making our way east towards Kentucky and the Red River Gorge.

Tuscon

Hueco Tanks, Texas

We spent a great week bouldering at Hueco with our friends Ben and Aram. Hueco Tanks Historical Park is about 25 miles east of El Paso, Texas. It’s an international destination for bouldering, believe it or not! It’s also an important site for Native American pictographs. Because it became so popular, there’s now a strict limit on the number of people who are allowed to enter the park per day. If you want to climb there you either have to make a reservation, or show up before the gates open and hope to be one of the 10 people they let in without reservations. Made for some early mornings for us! We developed a good system, though. Get up early, eat breakfast and drive to the park to line up, then go find a nice sunny place in the park to nap for a couple of hours! It was perfect.

The bouldering was a lot of fun, and we really enjoyed hanging out with Ben and Aram. Plus, we had amazing weather! Beautiful sunny days, nights that stayed above freezing….bliss!

On one of our rest days we took a trip down the road an hour or so to Guadalupe Mountains National Park. We took a 9 mile hike up to Hunter’s Peak, the second highest point in Texas. It was a great hike, though a little more than we reckoned for. The scenery was beautiful, we even saw some cliffs that looked like they were begging to be climbed, but they were too far away to explore. We finished hiking out just after dark…..9 miles and 2,500 feet of elevation gain (and loss) in 5 hours.

We climbed until the very last minute, ran back to the campground to pack up the car, and hit the road about 5:00. Next stop…back west to Tuscon, Arizona to go to a friend’s wedding. On the road again!

Hueco

Northern Arizona: The Tourist Life

After about 7 hours of driving we arrived at the National Forest just south of the Grand Canyon. Word on the web was that you could camp anywhere in the forest as long as you’re ¼ mile away from the main road, so we scouted out a little dirt road and found a good spot to camp tucked away in the trees. It was cold!! Low temperature overnight…..19 degrees. We slept out under the stars, bundled up in lots of clothes. The next morning it was on to take a gander at the big ditch. Spent the day driving to different lookout points throughout the park, took lots of pictures and also took a little hike along the rim. We realized it’s been quite a while since we’ve spent time in regular, mainstream America…it was a little bit of culture shock! After getting our fill of the sights, and being frozen by the wind, we got back on the road and headed east towards the Navaho National Monument and the cliff dwellings at Betatakin.

We arrived just after dark to find the campground deserted but, fortunately, open. And still free! I had visited there one summer during high school to see the cliff dwellings with my mom and sister. It was a beautiful, isolated spot and I remembered the hike in to see the village being one of the highlights of our trip. I was hoping that they still had guided hikes, but, alas, they don’t during the winter. We could see the trail down from the top of the canyon, all covered in deep snow. Actually, the whole park was covered in snow, and we had another cold night. But, there was one bright spot: a heated bathroom with running water! I’m learning to appreciate the little luxuries, especially after weeks of pit toilets and desert campgrounds where you have to bring your own water. Turning on a faucet seemed like a little bit of magic! We spent some time the next morning at the visitor center and took a short walk to the edge of the canyon, then headed back out on the road. We took a little detour up to Monument Valley just over the border in Utah. The rock formations are just incredible, we were drooling over the climbing possibilities but it’s on the Navaho reservation and they don’t permit climbing on them. Oh well. Onward to Canyon de Chelly to see more ancient cliff dwellings.

We spent the next day touring around Canyon de Chelly. It’s also on the Navaho Nation reservation. It was interesting to see the cliff dwellings, but even more interesting to see the modern farms still being tended at the bottom of the canyon. It must be an amazing place to live! You’re not allowed to hike into the canyon unless you have a certified Navaho guide with you; I can see why since you’d essentially be walking around in people’s ranches and farmland. There is one area where they’ve established a hiking trail down into the canyon so you can get a closer look at one of the ruins. Mike and I took a walk in (followed part of the way by a very endearing stray dog); it was a beautiful place to hike. However, not an especially warm day, so we didn’t linger too much! By mid-afternoon we’d seen our fill and were ready to move on to the next adventure. There were a couple more places I was interested in seeing on our way towards El Paso. We were trying to figure out which route to take and where we might want to camp when we noticed some grim, gray clouds moving in. Turned on the radio to find a weather report; forecast for the night was a low of 17 degrees and snow showers!!! Aaaarrrgggh! I was less than thrilled about that prospect to say the least. The point of being in the Southwest was to avoid winter weather, not be plagued by it! Studied the map some more, did some calculating and decided to try to drive to El Paso, our next climbing destination. Mike figured we could make it before midnight, and sure enough we did. Found the Hueco Rock Ranch, set up our tent and collapsed into bed, very grateful that the temperature would be staying above freezing!

Northern Arizona

Joshua Tree: Spring comes to the desert

We arrived in Joshua Tree National Park late Saturday night (Feb 23rd), not quite out of the storm. It rained almost the entire 5 hour drive, and there were high winds with crazy gusts. We were planning to meet up with Mike’s friend Jay, so we drove to the main climber campground hoping he’d managed to find a site there. Unfortunately he wasn’t there, and he’d left a note that he was at a different campground kind of a hike down the road. It was almost midnight and we were exhausted and not keen to keep driving. We decided to check the next campground to see if there were any sites free, and in a welcome change to our luck there was one site available. We stumbled out of the car and set up the tent in unbelievably high winds….I still don’t know how we managed it! Threw sleeping bags inside and collapsed, just glad to be warm and dry and out of the wind. Mind you, we didn’t actually get to sleep all that much because the wind was blowing the tent around like crazy! Nylon blowing in the wind isn’t all that quiet, to say the least. We decided to give up trying to sleep any longer by 6:30, packed up as quickly as we could and headed back to town to do a little food shopping and time killing until people left for the weekend and we could get a campsite. As we got to town it started raining…oh joy! Grrrr. We’ve certainly been plagued by some bad weather. I’ve never seen so much rain in the desert. Still, we did get to see a fantastic rainbow out of the deal! We did finally get a campsite and spent a couple of hours setting it up, clearing out the car and organizing all our stuff now that it was dry. We met up with Jay and his friends in the evening and they joined us at our site. Spent some time around the fire and looked forward to the rest of the week…..weather prediction: sunny and 70s every day!

We had three days of climbing with the Tuscon guys. Did a lot of fun routes and I worked on leading some harder stuff. Mike did the same, he had a couple of routes he’d had his eye on that he was excited to complete. The weather was just gorgeous and we reveled in the sunshine! Took one rest day to just bask in the sun, rest our bodies and read (and get a little sunburned, oops!), then we climbed two more days. We met a group of guys from NH, ironically enough! Somehow we had never bumped into each other at home, but it was fun to hear a little bit of New England in their accents. I really enjoyed the climbing, but I also had a wonderful time watching Spring arrive. Bushes that looked gray and dead suddenly sprouted lots of little green leaves overnight; birds arrived and sang to us all day; everything seemed to be coming back to life! Every night we’d hear the coyotes calling to each other from quite near the campground. Their yips and howls and barks sounded like a conversation and I wished I had my Coyote-to-English dictionary! One coyote would stroll throught the campground every evening just after sunset, just poking around, hoping to find food laying around. I felt so much a part of all the wildness there, it’s definitely one of my favorite places.

Sunday morning arrived with another windstorm, just to make sure we didn’t enjoy too much good weather. Sigh. Packed up our stuff, tried not to let the tent get blown away, and hit the road. We made a pit stop in town for showers and laundry (a luxury!) then started driving toward the Grand Canyon for a week of sightseeing. Everywhere we go I wish I could stay a little longer….even though we have lots of time there’s somehow never enough!

Joshua Tree

Bishop, CA: Happy and Sad

We spent nearly a week in Bishop, one of the most popular bouldering areas in the US. The climbing we did there was amazing and fun! There are several different locations with two very different kinds of rock and ambiance. We drove northwest from Death Valley on Sunday night, it was a spectacular drive as we headed north through a valley between the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains and the western side of the White mountains (no, not those White Mts NH people). We arrived at the campground just after sunset, exhausted and wishing for bed. The moon was almost full and cast an eerie blue glow over the snow covered mountains…..it was just incredible, I’ve never seen mountains that high! The next morning was clear and beautiful, but we were so tired from our weekend adventure that we decided to take some time to relax, sit in a café in Bishop and catch up on organizing photos and blogging and such. In the afternoon we went to one of the main bouldering areas—the Buttermilks-- just a few miles outside of town. We got there to find the road partly covered with snow, and a good deal of snow on the ground! We tromped through shin-deep snobanks in our t-shirts to get up to the slope where the boulders are. Pretty bizarre. The afternoon was lovely, but sadly it was our last nice weather for the week. Alas! We went to the place that’s famous for nice, dry, warm weather in the winter and we got rained and snowed on. Tuesday and Wednesday it was just cloudy and cool, and we went bouldering at an area called the Happy Boulders (yes, there are Sad Boulders too, hence the title). The rock is really interesting, it’s volcanic and it weathers away to lots of bizarre shapes and overhanging roofs that are fun to monkey around on! With just two of us we managed to get completely worn out in just a few hours each day, but it was great fun to just wander up the little canyon from boulder to boulder, look at an interesting line of holds on the rock and say ‘Let’s climb that!’.

Wednesday night we were lucky enough to have clear weather for the lunar eclipse....it was a phenomenal sight! Mike took a lot of great pictures with his new camera. Once the moon was covered we got our first real view of the stars!

Thursday our arms just couldn’t pull us up any more rocks, and the weather wasn’t great, so we went for a little drive and exploration. We’d planned to go up to Mammoth, a popular ski town just 45 minutes or so to the north, and we did get there eventually after a little detour. As we drove up the highway, Mike saw a sign for Hot Creek and we decided to go find out what it was. A little swim in a hot spring sounded pretty good at that point, so we kept our fingers crossed. A mile or so down the road the plowed area stopped, but there was another sign saying Hot Creek was a mile and a half away, and we thought that sounded like a nice little walk so off we went. The road was covered with at least 8 inches of snow but it was all packed down from people walking and snowshoeing and stuff, so it was a fairly easy walk. We eventually took a side trail down to the edge of the creek, it wasn’t hot by any stretch of the imagination but it wasn’t frozen over either. In the distance we could see some steam rising, so we trudged along, eventually getting there to find that it was all fenced off and not safe to swim in because of increased arsenic and unpredictable temperature spikes! So sad! We did stick our hands in; it didn’t feel all that hot but we decided it was best not to risk it seeing as the stream had obviously been eating away at the banks and looked a little dodgy. As we turned around to start back to the car, the gray clouds I’d been seeing creep up behind us turned into….a snowstorm! Huzzah! (that’s sarcasm, in case you were wondering). Luckily we had both worn hats and coats, so we didn’t get too cold, but walking a mile and a half with wet snow being blown into your face isn’t all that entertaining! Still, it wasn’t too terrible, and we got back to the car very glad for the opportunity to get warm and dry. We went up the road a few more miles to Mammoth, drove around the little ski town (wasn’t very exciting), then headed back to camp. We arrived late in the afternoon just as the rain was starting. Sigh. Had an elegant dinner date in the car (dinner and a movie…our own personal drive in! Portable DVD player sure is handy.) and went to bed with snow falling.

Friday’s weather was just as delightful so we spent the day holed up in a café drinking coffee and getting restless. We did take a fun walk around downtown; Bishop is really a cute little spot. Almost all of the stores have a very late-60’s feel to them, obviously locally owned and run; not much evidence of standard corporate America which is a nice change. One of the highlights is Schat’s Bakery, which makes unbelievable breads and pastries and was very crowded every time we went in. I planned to take pictures of some of the stores, but we didn’t have the camera and ran out of daylight on our last day. So you’ll just have to imagine how great it was! Saturday started out pretty nice, but another storm was predicted to start in the afternoon so we packed up and planned to leave after we finished bouldering for the day. Mike’s friends Ben and Dan joined us (they live a few hours away), we climbed at the Sad boulders and made the best of the day, though it was cold and sprinkled for most of the afternoon. The rain started in earnest around 5:00, so we said our goodbyes and hit the road, headed south for warmth and sunshine in Joshua Tree!

Bishop