The desert gets inside you, in subtle and in extreme ways, it changes how you think and how you feel. It's the distance and the light and the extremes; it is almost always hot or cold, rarely warm or cool. It requires strong language to describe, nothing warm or cool or soft about it.
It had been fifteen years or more since I visited Red Rocks last, too long. I immediately found myself making promises to myself that I have to visit Red Rocks every year for the rest of my life. The formations are breathtaking and the climbs provide fantastic adventures. There are small cliffs with lots of bolt but these hold very little interest for me. I am drawn to the Rainbow Mountain and Mount Wilson and Black Velvet Canyon. These enormous features with their long and complex approaches and majestic heights are what captures my imagination.
I picked up the rental car and Patrick at the same time. His flight came arrived in the late morning and so he had spent a fair amount of time seeking out the seedy underbelly behind Vegas' Disney veneer. I found him sleeping off a quart of margaritas on a comfy couch in the Galactica style rental car pavilion. It didn't take us long to find a hole in the wall Irish pub to kill the rest of the evening waiting for Ryan's flight to arrive.
The camping scene at Red Rocks is lame. It's a harsh landscape and the spot that the Park has allowed for camping is rocky and windswept and a long ways from the majestic beauty of the cliffs. We arrived in the midst of the Red Rocks Rendezvous and so couldn't even land one of the gravely wind tunnel sites. Instead, we commando camped in the dirt too close to the road. The Red Rocks that I visited so many years ago has been modified a fair amount by the non-climber land manager crowd and the result is a significantly less user friendly place. Mainly the approaches to many of the best formations have been extended back to the main road and that has created some long approaches. On the bright side of this fact is that earning your pitches will probably earn you some solitude you might not otherwise have had.
Patrick and Ryan had never met before and they hit it off perfectly. It was cool for me because Patrick has been a friend and partner since we were teenagers and Ryan is a new partner who I expect to share a lot of climbing days with. Ryan is a strong young climber too and so like the old farts we are becoming Pat and I let Ryan run that rope right up the cliff for us. We climbed excellent routes like Triassic Sand sands and Wholesome Fullback, mostly 5.9 and 5.10 pitches, moved smoothly and efficiently and laughed it up along the way.
I was struck once again at how beautiful the drainages in Red Rocks are. The rounded stones, the small pools and green gardens in the otherwise dry cactus landscape are cool and serene and the effort of scrambling around in there is a joy. The stark contrast between the relative green of the creek bed and the surrounding desert and the closeness of the drainage and immense rock walls soaring above is something very special and unlike anything we can experience here in the Northeast.
After five days of climbing in Red Rocks I split with Patrick and Ryan for Joshua Tree. The three hour drive was straight forward across the immense distance and space of southern Nevada. I was amazed by the sheer sprawl of Las Vegas and it's surrounding communities. The voracious corporate chain concrete McMansion machine is feeding happily on the desert's open spaces and is showing little or no sign of stopping to recognize basic realities of finite resources.
It is hard to for me to believe that it took me twenty five years to finally visit Joshua Tree. An old roommate once gave me a copy of Randy Vogel's 1986 guide and I have carried it around for all these years, occasionally opening it up to look at the topo's and route names and yet still I failed to make the time.
As I drove into the park I was immediately in awe of the brilliant array of flowers carpeting the desert floor and of the freakish Joshua Trees themselves with their odd milky white flowers and modern dance poses. I had talked to a friend about the busy campgrounds ahead of time and he told me about another friend that was leaving that morning. I made a bee line for the site in the Hidden Valley campground and found it vacant. I got out of the car and immediately met some young climbers from Washington who invited me to jump in their car to go see a desert tortoise they discovered the day before. They took me into the Wonderland of Rocks, through a maze of massive boulders and crack lined faces to a quite, shaded spot where desert paintbrush and a tortoise can thrive.
Of course I was not in J-tree to visit turtles or marvel at the sunrise light, I had the AMGA exam to do. The exam is a necessary evil, I suppose. I look forward to visiting the park again with the intent solely of being and climbing in the place. The routes I did get to do were mostly excellent. I especially enjoyed Poodles are People Too at the Hemingway Buttress and Frosty Cone at the DQ Wall. I was most impressed with the immense amount of climbing, what the area lacks in height it more than makes up in shear numbers of routes; over seven thousand. It is like three times the size of the Gunks!
On my first day back from the trip I went out to climb with Marty and was immediately reminded of how amazing the rock is here in the Gunks. All the beauty of these desert environments and vastness and clarity of light does not change the fact that the rock here in the Gunks is simply the best.
And now the season begins!
