{"id":3384,"date":"2020-01-10T18:01:37","date_gmt":"2020-01-10T18:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/?p=3384"},"modified":"2020-01-11T19:49:23","modified_gmt":"2020-01-11T19:49:23","slug":"a-river-runs-through-it-xmas-at-joshua-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/2020\/01\/a-river-runs-through-it-xmas-at-joshua-tree\/","title":{"rendered":"A River Runs Through It, Xmas at Joshua Tree"},"content":{"rendered":"

I drove down to Jtree December 14 arriving in 30 hours to camp in BLM land the next 3 nights. Jim’s friend Mark the SAR ranger saw me walking around solo and brought me a partner named…Cole? We had a great two days\u00a0 of climbing before I ran into John G who had a parking spot in 30. That is the 3rd time John has hooked me up.<\/p>\n

I did the dawn patrol the next morning and lucked out with a couple boulderers who were leaving site 15. After that Chad showed up and we were golden. Dennis showed up and immediately hooked up with Angeli, another solo climber. The three of us climbed together for a couple days while Chad got over a cold. After that we played mix and match as more people showed up including Anni, Liz, Ken & Christine and Cam & Carmen.<\/p>\n

Weather stayed very nice until Xmas day when I picked up Sue and Lisa at the airport. It snowed 14″ the next day then stayed cold for 4 days. We took one\u00a0 or two days off at the hot springs, and spent another day at Indian Cove where it was warm. On the third day after the snow we were able to climb Hands Off and Toe Jam but it was frigid! My 5.9 skills were more like 5.6 with frozen fingers under windy overcast skies.<\/p>\n

Our ten year old REI winter tent leaked an inch of water in the bottom. We had to buy a tarp to line the floor to keep our down bags out of the lake\/river. There are no flat sandy stake-able tent platforms down there. They are either lake beds or rivers, choose one. Both of our tents were literally in rivers of water melting off the nearby formations. When new that tent had a bathtub floor that worked. Now it’s in the dumpster and we are day dreaming about a Four Wheel pop up camper on a Tundra…though that will have to wait until our ship comes in. The people sleeping-cooking in vans and pickup campers looked perfectly comfortable.<\/p>\n

Tents normally work great if they are new on a good campspot in light rain. We’ve never needed anything more. But this extreme weather has changed the game. I was very glad I’d driven down with my studs in the RAV4. We saw numerous people get stuck on the compact snow and ice simply driving around the campground. Two funny guys were driving around the snowed in roads of the campground in a jeep towing\u00a0 a kayak. He was balancing with his paddle on the careening kayak as the whole campground cheered. I’d look up from cooking my eggs and there he’d go around again.<\/p>\n