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Austin, James, Brett and Mark |
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By Edgeworks Member - Mark Webster
Our Edgeworks trip to Joshua Tree was conceived in November when I posted a "Christmas at Joshua Tree", note on the edgeworksclimbing.com forum. Brett responded immediately from Montana, and Austin from Tacoma not long after that.
I'd never met either climber but arranged to meet Austin that week at the gym. As soon as we shook hands, I realized I had seen him around the gym for months. We soon became regular leading partners at the gym and I began to believe the trip would take off, but we needed someone with a bigger car.
I sent an email to Mindy from the Tacoma Mountaineers about the trip and she forwarded it out to all the Tacoma members. Soon we heard from James, a very experienced climber, who had the required 1986 Dodge Caravan, which he called: "Flipper", because, as James said, "it's a dirty gray color, and it has a tendency to flip over".
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Mark following Brett up Pinched Rib |
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We met a few times at the gym getting to know each other and had a great time. We met Brett on the evening of the 16th, loaded up Flipper and hit the road. We did the trip down in 26 hours, though it would have been faster had Flipper not blown a radiator.
I knew it was going to be an entertaining drive down when I noticed Flipper's rear lift gate door had to be supported with a broom handle. All the side doors made ominous creaking and snapping sounds when opened, and both the gas gauge and speedometer were broken. By placing Austin's GPS on the dash and waiting 5 minutes, we could sort of establish our speed, and the gas gauge low fuel light would blink on when we had 40 miles left. It was a classical example of the dirt-bag climbers car.
We started our trip with a few moderate climbs around Hidden Valley campground. We taught Austin to lead trad on the first day and he was soon leading cracks with confidence. Joshua Tree ratings are what is known as "old school" ratings. A 5.8 crack can feel like a 5.10b if your crack climbing skills are rusty. The bolts on most of the routes are disturbingly far apart. I remember leading a 5.9 that had normal spacing of about 8 to 12 feet on the hard section, but up where it eased off to easier (though still tricky) 5.8 friction, the bolts were 30 feet apart. I got thoroughly gripped on that one and had to hang at the bolt until I could wrap my mind around the possibility of taking a 60 foot screamer.
We continued to climb around the Hidden Valley campground area for the next couple weeks, slowly working out the rust in our climbing skills. The gym is great for making friends and keeping your fingers strong, and the leading there is good for the head, but climbing outside is another ball game entirely. Still, we were loving every minute of it and gradually worked our way onto some harder climbing.
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Brett leading Dappled Mare (5.8) |
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We woke up to high winds one day and headed down to Indian Cove Campground which is a thousand feet lower and protected from the winds. There is some beautiful climbing down there, and even some multi pitch routes. My favorite lead at Indian Cove is a deceptively hard 5.7 called Duchess Right.
When you look at it from the bottom, it appears to be a straight forward 60 foot fist jam problem. James tried it first and had the good sense to back off after placing my number 2 Big Bro. I think of myself as an experienced off width climber but that crack was horrible. I found I could hold on well enough to not fall out of it, but there was no way to move up. I tried my entire bag of tricks including heel-toe jams, chicken wings and hip jams but nothing worked...I couldn't even move half an inch past the crux.
Finally I tried stacking two fist jams one on top of the other to span the seven inch crack. To my amazement, I was able to do a pull up on the stacked fist jams, wiggle my hips free, do a crunch, wedge my right hip back in and raise the double fist jam. There wasn't any pro of course as I only had the one Big Bro, but after 15 feet I got in a micro cam and was able to finish the route.
The parties around the campfires in Joshua Tree are almost worth the drive all by themselves. During our second week we were sitting in camp over breakfast and bemoaning the fact that there were very few women climbers around. We felt like a bunch of gold miners up in the Yukon, starved for the site of a real, live woman. Almost as if in answer to our dreams, two lively young women walked up and asked if we knew Andrew, who was our neighbor.
They promised to come back that night with a guitar, a violin and another guitarist named Tucker who was traveling with them. They turned out to be very good musicians. So good in fact that we formed a band that night: two guitars, a violin and me on the blues harmonica. After a couple rehearsals around the next few campfires we took our band on the road down to site 16 where there was a huge campfire, a sweat lodge and 24 bundles of wood.
The crowd loved having a live band, and we enjoyed the heck out of entertaining them. During a break, we heard the sweat lodge was having a ladies only hour, and our two new friends (Amy and Jessica) left while Austin, Tucker and I took a break and enjoyed the fire and starlight.
An hour later, I noticed a commotion at the door to the sweat lodge and turned to see Austin, starkers except for a small towel held in his hand, turning in the light of 20 headlamps for the cheering crowd.
I asked him later how he ended up in the sweat lodge during the ladies hour and he just smiled...the guy has all the luck.
After we met the girls and Tucker, we began climbing with them every day, they were a ton of fun to hang out with. We've stayed in touch with Jessica and her friends from Portland after we returned to Tacoma.
Jessica, Austin, Paul, Richard and I re-united down at Smith Rocks over Presidents day and had a great time. It's fun how we have built a little community of friends at Edgeworks and it gets bigger all the time. I used to go in there and know maybe one or two people, but now I see people I know in there all the time.
Kudos to all the employees at Edgeworks for running a great facility!
For more pictures and the complete story (click
here)!
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