"I wouldn't say I'm specifically a hero for what I did. The real heroes do what I did and drive a Prius."
In March I drove out to Joshua Tree to do a DPS peak, Eagle Mountain. I turned around shy of the summit due to timing.
So, I decided to try it again and this time I got an earlier start. Things were going well until they took quite a turn for the worse.
Near Yermo, CA in the Mojave desert in California, there's a sculpture park against communism, censorship, and the current mainland China regime.
My visit was timely because they were protesting a fire that destroyed an RV and an outbuilding; they allege it was started by a CCP agent. One of their sculptures allegedly suffered the same fate a couple of years ago.
While some might wonder why such a park is in the middle of the desert, it's actually a good location. The park is right off the freeway so thousands of people bound for Las Vegas or L.A. see it every day.
It was eagles and lemonade and sharp spiky plants all the way down.
I posted a meetup event to hike Eagle Mountain, a DPS peak in the southern part of Joshua Tree. Three people RSVPed, and all three silently flaked. So I decided to do it solo. Generally it's a very unwise idea to do an unfamiliar, rarely-visited, off-trail desert scramble alone, but needs must.
I failed the first time, but this time I got the sheep.
This was on a trip with a group of tigers from the Sierra Club so I didn't have to worry about navigation. Unlike the first try which went up the AllTrails route, this went up a canyon to the south and it was a little bit easier. But, it was still a rough scramble up one rock, down that rock, up another rock, over and over for over two miles.
Near the top there was a brief Class 3 move.
The Sheep Hole Mountains are a small range not far from Twentynine Palms in the Mojave desert. The highpoint of the range is just 4613', but getting to it involves a tough Class 2/Class 3 scramble. I did this with someone else and, because I'd just driven in, we got a late start and due to the time we had to turn around before we got to the top. There were also issues with finding the best route.
The boulders you see in the pictures are quite large even if it looks otherwise.
I'm going to try this again and report back.
This post should be filled with pics from Death Valley, except I went there during a heatwave so I wasn't going to do much hiking. The first day I just lounged around Furnace Creek enjoying the heat. In the shade, not exerting myself, the heat was really great. It was, per my car's thermometer, about 118F or 120F. Others, of course, might think that's a tad too hot.
The original Del Taco location is located in Yermo, not far from Barstow in the Mojave desert. Unfortunately it was closed the day that I was driving by.