The Joshua Tree Birthday Trip
The Birthday Girl: Linda
The Mission: 35 pitches in a day (for her 35th year of awesomeness on this planet)
The Support Crew: Her fiance Ty, friend Cat, and Me, Paul, Silas & Ivan
Joshua Tree, California
First stop, The Hemingway area
Ivan is confident in Linda’s hardcoreness
Silas is psyched on J-tree’s endless supply of fun play areas
Ty and Linda scope routes and Cat hydrates while Paul tries to remember what the heck an ATC is
Linda rockin’ the trad
Next stop, The Real Hidden Valley
Linda banging out routes on The Thin Wall
My cute boys observe
Silas studies the guidebook
…and then can’t take it anymore. He needs to climb too so Paul runs back to the van to grab his gear. If the kids are psyched to climb, we jump on it! 🙂
Meanwhile, Linda still crushing in the upper left of the photo.
Assessing the day’s progress. I think she has something like 19 routes to go at this point, and it’s late afternoon.
Decision made to push on and see how far she can get
Final stop, Trash Can wall for some easy climbs that she can run up quickly
…the sun is waning…
…and she calls it a night. Decision made to party with friends versus push on in the cold and wind and darkness. Here we are huddled in the warm van feasting on chips & salsa, fresh salad, stew, bread and birthday cake.
Total pitches climbed: 24
Total amount of agave spirits drank that night: LOTS
The next morning we rise to sunny skies despite a threatening forecast
We light a campfire, fix up some french toast
and then the promised forecast moves in
We hike and play around on the boulders a bit after breakfast
…as the storm approaches
And then the wind and rain engulf us and we all run top speed back to our vehicles, soaking wet and laughing hysterically. What a birthday adventure!
posted by arr
This entry (Permalink) was posted
on Friday, February 5th, 2016 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Joshua Tree-California.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0
feed.
You can leave a response
, or trackback
from your own site.
Leave a Reply