Joshua Tree

The girls wound up with a 4 day weekend at Veteran's Day thanks to a furlough day. We took advantage and made a reservation to camp for two nights in Joshua Tree National Park at Indian Cove Campground. Our friends the Zs and Bs came with us. We drove out Thursday after lunch and spent the first afternoon setting up our campsite. When you make reservations online its hard to know exactly what you will wind up with but in this case we could not have chosen a nicer site. The campground has many rock formations and the campsites are nestled among the rocks. A lot of the sites we saw were narrow - wedged between the rocks and the gravel road. Our site was in a horse shoe shaped formation so we were surrounded on three sides by rock. It was very private and since it was windy, protected too. The sites are fairly primitive. We had to fill up water containers at the ranger station about two mile from the campground and the bathrooms were glorified port a potties. But the beauty of the surroundings more than made up for the inconveniences. As the grown ups worked on setting up the kids quickly got acquainted with the rocks surrounding us. Two walls were fairly steep but the third had great rocks for scrambling. They spent all afternoon finding caves and playing war games. We were pretty sure that someone would tumble eventually but the worst injury all weekend was a scrape.
Around 3:30 the sun dropped below the ridge near us and the temperature plummeted. Fortunately we had prepared and everyone started layering on clothes. Soon after we started the campfire and dinner. Since it was pretty dark by 5:30 we ate early. That meant we had a long evening by the campfire. S'mores and talking filled in the time until about 8:00 when everyone was ready for bed.
Friday morning dawned bright and early. We were up and going by 7:00. It was still pretty chilly but a nice warm breakfast got us going. Again the kids scrambled on the rocks in our campsite until John packed up his gear and took us for a walk to another area in the campground. There he climbed a relatively easy route and set us up with ropes. Emily was first to volunteer to make the climb. She carefully found her hand and foot holds and without too much trouble made her first official climb. She was estatic. She even did a great job rapelling back down to her starting point.
Little Jake was next on the rope. At 3 1/2 he wasn't quite ready to climb all the way to the top. So we lowered him down and let Claire go next. She was gung ho to scramble up. Her shoes were not as willing to go to the top. At one point she had lost both. Fortunately Troy was in a good position from his look out spot to help her put them back on. Once they were on tight she practically flew to the top of the rock. She really liked rapelling too.

Dean was next to go. He did fairly well getting started but right at the point of no return, he lost his nerve. He was having a hard time trusting the ropes to keep him safe and just wanted to scramble like he was used to on the other rocks. We coaxed him to the top where he had to spend a few minutes collecting himself before coming back down. He never did get the hang of rapelling. He was really trying to slide down the rock which made him even more nervous. After he finally go down he was done for the day on the ropes. Fortunately he went right back to scrambling on the rocks so he really wasn't scared off of the whole experience.

Emily and Claire each wanted another turn and did fabulously. Claire certainly didn't have any issues with trusting the ropes. On her second climb she started to lose her shoe again. On a fairly steep part of the rock, she sat down, adjusted her shoe and was back to climbing in no time. It was pretty amazing to watch. Not to be outdone by my girls I had to give it a try too. Of course the kids make it look so much easier than it is. The foot and hand holds that they found so easily apparently disappeared when it was my turn. At one point I thought I was going to have to end my climb and start back down. But when I leaned back into the rope to start down I realized I could make the next step up just as easily as down. So I did make it to the top! I had to head down fairly quickly before I started thinking about it too much. Once everyone had had the turns they needed we cleaned up and headed back to camp and lunch. John had to climb back up to bring our gear back down. Unfortunately he made his job even harder by throwing things down and getting them stuck on the plants growing on the side of the rock. He had to reach out unroped to free it. I had to watch else where.

After lunch I thought we would go to another spot to do the ropes again but the kids were just as happy playing on "their" rocks. It was a relaxing afternoon of scrambling, reading, napping and just enjoying some time off.

Again dinner was early right around sunset. After dinner we got the fire going again. John started telling stories of the ancient gods and godesses. Dean was enraptured. When John needed a break we started telling stories in the round. One person would start a story line then turn in over to the next person to add onto it. The stories got pretty ridiculous pretty fast. The girls declared that we should tell stories like that every time we go camping in the future though. One of our recurring characters was Awesome Squirrel. He seemed to show up in every story that we told. The other cool thing about the fires was watching the light flicker on the rocks around us. It could have been really spooky looking but instead it was just beautiful.

Saturday morning came early again. After breakfast it was time to clean up camp.

While we were rock climbing, Karl and Margarida had found a nice hike that they told us about. Once the cars were packed up we drove to the Fortynine Palm Oasis trailhead. Getting to the Oasis took us along a 3 mile round trip walk. There was some altitude gain so it wasn't the easiest walk but the kids made it without too much complaint. Claire and Dean were our guides on the way to the Oasis. They had picked up some Junior Ranger guide books and were busy reading and trying to identify the various plants we found. Emily was busy taking pictures for a Girl Scout badge she is working on. Once we made it to the Oasis, we rested for awhile and tried to convince Emily that we were truly at an oasis. I think she was picturing something more along the lines of Hawaii. While we rested we overheard some other groups talking about a desert tortoise that they had seen on the way. We tried to identify where they had seen it but there just aren't that many landmarks to identify where they had seen it. So we joked on the way back that we should keep our eyes peeled for a tortoise. Sure enough as we were talking, Troy says, "There it is." Calm as could be. Shannon and I were sure he was joking with us. But sure enough we looked where he was looking and there was a little tortoise cruising along just off the trail. We stopped to watch him for a few minutes and take a few pictures. The next group that came along seemed more intent on getting right in the poor creature's space. The guys took the kids and kept up their walk. Shannon and I stayed behind to glare at the offender until he started walking again too.

We had one more stop to make on our way out of town at the Information Center so I could get my patch and the girls could turn in their Junior Ranger books. Emily hadn't really gotten into it but Claire was busy checking off what she had seen and filling in the blanks on the pages. At the Information Center, the Ranger talked with Claire for a few minutes, quizzing her to make sure she had really done everything she had written about. He was especially interested in our tortoise siting and even wanted Daddy to fill out a report. (Ironically he couldn't find the paperwork.) When he was done he got everyone's attention in the room, made Claire raise her right hand to take the Junior Ranger oath, then presented her with her badge and a book. The book is not for sale and can only be earned by Junior Rangers. It was so cute. The Ranger certainly could have just handed her her badge and book and been done with it but he really made her feel special.

We've been wanting to make a trip to go climbing for awhile now. It went better than I could have imagined. John fulfilled one of his dreams to see his girls in harnesses hanging off of rocks. They are hooked and will certainly want to go again. We are getting better at camping. It seems to get easier each time we do it (even though we missed packing a bag of food into the car this trip! oops) Despite my best efforts we have become a camping family but I love it because I love the people I go with.