Heroic adventures are the adventures that you look back on and think “Man, glad I made it through that one… that was awesome!”. Example: Snowshoeing up the Cache La Poudre River in Colorado in March when you are 20 or 21, it’s snowing and you’re sleeping under a tarp in a depression dug in the snow and drinking cowboy coffee in the morning. Age-appropriate heroic adventures are renting an RV, dry camping in very sparsely populated national park campground at Joshua Tree (here is the heroic part…) winds blowing out of the north at up to 30 knots, gusting to 35 knots, air temperature at night hovering in the mid-30’s, lots of snow visible on San Gorgonio and San Jacinto Mountauins and the RV house battery powering the fan on the propane heater indicating that it had been a long day and it was taking the rest of the night off. To add to the excitement, the RV was a small class B coach on a Dodge Ram van chassis so there was only a 4-gallon cassette toilet on board, and we used the NP pit toilets for the majority of our waste disposal activities. We were not sure if the lack of odor in the facility was due to incredible engineering or if everything down in the hole was frozen. I believe it was engineering since the venting on that hole was phenomenal, increasing in intensity with each wind gust. It was the opposite of the nice warm Japanese bidet experience. However, as in real life heroic adventures, everything looked much better each morning thanks to our Keurig coffee maker brew with Kahlua and or Baileys to help warm up the morning.
But I digress. We spent three nights camping at Jumbo Rocks in Joshua Tree in a largely empty primitive campground surrounded by monzogranite everywhere that we looked. In case it is not obvious yet…. I am in awe of this place. Almost as much as Mesa Verde. JT is a geologist Mecca and now, finally after almost 48 years, I do know the answer to the question of why a granite is a granite.
I had initially started the planning on this adventure thinking that we could sleep in a tent, or alternatively (after a very short discussion with my better half), I could sleep in a tent and Joni could sleep in an RV. Luckily, high wind warnings and the forecast of butt numbing cold gave me a gracious way out of that heroic foolishness and the tent stayed home.
We did get a couple of hikes in during the trip so there are pictures below. Notice that the sun was out all day, and the stars (including the Milky Way and every airplane flying into the LA Basin) were all visible at night. The downside was the wind, which did moderate on Wednesday during the day but came back with a gusty vengeance around 3:00 AM on Thursday morning.
I did cut way back on the number of pictures include (no… really, I did!). As I told Joni, you can only take so many pictures of really odd-looking granite.
