Joshua Tree Decompression
Sometime last week I decided that I needed to get away from the city for a few days. My old-reliable escape destination since I moved to LA has been Joshua Tree National Park. It has several distinct advantages over most every other destination within 2 hours of Los Angeles.
First, it is inexpensive. An annual pass to the park costs only $30 and I’ve had one for the past two years. Camping is just $10/night per campsite. I can say for a week at Joshua Tree for the same price as a single night at an inexpensive hotel/motel. And is an ice machine conveniently located just down the hall really worth 7x the price?
Joshua Tree’s second advantage is that it doesn’t attract large crowds of people. Last time I spent 3 days camping there, I only talked to one other person and only saw several people in total – it was fantastic. This time, even with the 100+ degree days and lack of most services (i.e. real bathrooms and running water), there were quite a few people visiting but still nothing like a state park on the ocean.
Third (and most importantly), it has basically zero cell coverage throughout the entire park area. This allows/forces me to really disconnect from the rest of the world. I get calls and text messages all day long (not to mention emails) and my morning routine before I even get out of bed is to 1) check email, 2) read facebook, 3) skim NY Times headlines and read any interesting stories, then 4) glance at twitter – only after all those tasks are completed do I even bother to crawl out from under the sheets. Not so during my time at Joshua Tree. You realize how long a day really can be when it’s not filled with constant attempts to “keep up” with various, often irrelevant, information.
For this trip, I brought my bike because one of the other great things about the park is that it has an abundance of well-kept paved roads which seemed to be great for riding. I had never actually ridden at Joshua Tree before this weekend, unless you count a miserable attempt about a year ago on my mountain bike to “go for a ride.” That ride went for about a mile outside my campsite up a hill before I gave up and turned around, sweating like crazy and with legs burning from the exertion. That was before I really started riding though, so I reckoned that this time around it would be a piece of cake seeing as how I have a road bike now and that I’ve been riding 50+ miles every week.
My plan on Friday was to get on the road by 2pm to beat most of the traffic out of town. In actuality, I was lucky to roll out of my garage just before 4pm. This meant that I had nothing but traffic on I-10 for about the first 30 miles. That first 30 miles took me almost 2 hours of painful stop-and-go traffic until I finally got past the I-15 interchange and traffic finally opened up. Unfortunately, this meant that I would not make it to the park until around 7:30pm which is just about sunset and I was concerned about setting up my tent and whatnot after dark.
But, when I arrived it turned out that the sun was just setting and the moon was unbelievably bright (nearly a full moon) and I had zero problems getting set up. Because it was so bright, I decided to try taking a few long-exposure shots after dark to see how they’d turn out and wow, I was surprised at how great they looked. People had campfires going and the twilight was beautiful. Got some fun pictures that evening and then crawled into the tent around 9:30pm in anticipation of riding Saturday morning. It was, in my estimation, about 65 degrees at night with a nice breeze blowing through the campsite and through my tent.
One of the nice things about camping in a remote location is that you very quickly acclimate to the natural cycle of day and night. Not much point saying up past dark and the gentle sunrise is an awesome way to awaken. I first woke up about 5:30 as the morning sky began to lighten, but I rolled over and slept for another hour or so while the sun really got going. I got dressed, ate some breakfast (Bear Naked banana crunch granola – yum!) and wandered around to see if there were any good photos to be made that morning. Nothing caught my eye so I walked back to camp and started to prep for my first ride. Filled up the camelback and water bottles with cold water, tossed my camera into the backpack along with a cliff bar and some jerky then applied a liberal coating of SPF 30 sunscreen.
I decided to start heading south which was uphill. My reasoning was that if I’m climbing for the first part of the ride it will make it easier to decide when to turn around and head back to camp – either when I couldn’t climb anymore or if it leveled out, then I would know the ride back would be easier than the ride out. This also makes it easy to ration water because even if I wasn’t tired, I would turn back when my water was half empty (or half full, if you’re an optimist) and I’d know that the water would last all the way to camp. In actuality, this first ride was a gentle upgrade the entire way and after just over 5 miles of that, I had had enough climbing and turned around. The ride back was for the most part very easy with a top speed of over 30mph but against a strong headwind most of the time which negated some of the downslope. But it was a nice 10.7 mile ride by the time I got back to camp, 45 minutes later.
My campsite was right up against some very large boulders which provided some fantastic shade in the morning hours, so I decided to do some reading for about 90 minutes while I rested from the ride. Then I realized that since I driven in so late I had not stopped at the ranger station to pay the entrance fee (and I need to get a new annual pass since mine expired in June). Instead of driving back out to the entrance, only 5 miles distant, I decided to bike it. So at 11:30 I hopped on the bike again heading north. The first mile was basically flat and the second mile consisted of small rolling hills which were quite pleasant. Then the downhill section started and after three miles, I realized that the ranger station wasn’t as close as I realized. “But hey,” I thought, “this is a nice relaxing downhill ride with the hot wind in my face, it’s nice!” When I hit mile 8, I started to worry as I sped downhill at speeds reaching 36mph (coasting). Finally, at mile 10 I reached the ranger station and purchased my new annual pass and took a little break in the shade, contemplating how much I was about to hate my life.
According to the GPS, that final 2 mile segment had an elevation drop of over 500 feet from 4000ft to 3500ft. This puts the grade at almost 5%. This is steep for a bicycle, and very steep for Gooley who until this time has spent most of his time riding in the flats with the occasional little hill. Before I had gone 100 yards, I was already in my lowest gear and still not spinning very fast. My speed was around 6mph – that’s 1/6th of the speed I had going the other direction. And it was brutally hot and tiring.
The only thought I had was that I should flag down the next pickup truck heading up the hill and beg for a ride. Two pickups passed me and I restrained myself. I now figure that real exercise starts when your attitude changes from “this is fun and I’m sweating, cool” to “kill me now.” It took me probably 30 minutes and 3 or 4 rest stops to ride up those 2 miles, the whole time thinking that walking the bike would be a better choice. But I stuck with it and made it to the top of that section to an official Exhibit and immediately sat down on the curb and drank about 8 oz of water right then while trying to guess how much more uphill there was between me and my camp.
At the exhibit, I met a nice couple from Minnesota who were vacationing in California for 12 days and had never been to Joshua Tree so I tried to give them a few pointers about the best things to see for the remainder of the day. They also asked me for some bike recommendations, which allowed me to play expert for a little while. Over the next 5 miles, we would leapfrog each other – them in their red rental car, me on my white bike.
After I finally made it back to camp, I went straight to my favorite shady place in the entire park with my book and my chair and spent the rest of the day in the shade. Hidden Valley campsite #31 is the best campsite in the park, but it was occupied when I arrived Friday evening. Luckily, it was unoccupied Saturday afternoon so I was able to take advantage of the nice cold (90 degree) cave and read for the rest of the day.
Saturday night was uneventful, I wandered around at sunset and took some pictures that turned out pretty OK. Then I went to bed around 9:30 again (guessing, because I wasn’t wearing my watch). Only problem was that some rock-climbing hippies were banging on their drum circle until late into the night and every so often, one of them would howl like a coyote. But, I suppose everyone is welcome in the desert.
All in all, the trip was fantastic and I now feel very relaxed and ready to re-integrate myself with the rest of the population. But I should probably shave first.
[View my favorite pictures from this trip here]