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!
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