How to Wear Bag-Lady Shoes with Flair and Panache
By: Matt Talley
 
 
 
It was a good day: Brauning and I had snaked a campsite for free in Ryan Campground and had set up a route on the other side of the campground. Brauning led a single-pitch trad route and I followed up, enjoying the climb, checking his gear placement and collecting it as I went up. The top of the formation had a great view and after turning around a few times to take in the view, we looked for the rappel anchors. Our search led us to the very top of the rock where we found out that the three large anchor bolts had been cut off flush with the stone. Crap. We gathered the rope and scrambled our way down over the other side. At the base of our next route we met an older couple, Mike and Janet who were both friendly and interested in our climbing gear. It turned out that Mike had been a climber in the late 1970’s and had spent a lot of time in the park back then. He had this fantastic old route guide book for the park that had all sorts of information on some really classic routes that the new guides leave out like stories behind the first ascents, which routes were done in the nude, reason’s why specific route and location names were chosen, et cetera… It really was a cool old book that I would have loved to of had a copy of. We sat there and talked to them while having lunch and talked about how it used to be in the pack in the ‘70’s, our jobs, camping, vacations and such while snacking.

Some of the campgrounds in the park have problems with coyotes and blackbirds. Well-meaning-but-clueless campers will leave food out on accident or worse, leave it specifically for the animals. This behavior has made the normally shy coyotes so brazen as to come into the campgrounds during the day sometimes. While we were talking to the couple at the base of our route, a group of 5 coyotes were visible about a hundred feet from where we sat. The couple had brought their huge chow-mix with them and he was not amused by the coyotes. Mike leashed him up and ran him into the brush with him to scare the coyotes away from camp. It worked. The minute the lead animal saw that large, slobbering, crazy-eyed hunk of dog rushing hungrily in its direction the whole pack turned and hauled major ass to parts unknown.

I led the next route and set up a fixed anchor after Brauning followed up. We could just tell that both of them wanted to give it a try so, I belayed both of them to the top of the rock on top-rope as they climbed an easy route adjacent to the one we had been on. Both of them really lit up when they topped out. It was like giving a ten year-old cookies with their milk on Saturday morning. After we all got down, Brauning and I headed over to Headstone Rock and Mike and Janet tagged along. Headstone is a fairly easy route, but it is REALLY exposed. You clip one bolt then move out over a 300’+ drop which made the route somewhat intimidating. Brauning and I ran up the thing and then belayed Mike up while Janet took pictures of it all. The climb was worth the exposure for the view alone. It offered a 300 degree vista: an amazing sight just as the sun was setting.
 
 
 
After we got off Headstone Mike and Janet split off and went back to camp, but not before offering to share their fire with us later. Brauning and I walked to an area near Headstone where there is an expansive flat layer of exposed sandstone that people had taken to using as a rock art canvas. It was level with the ground in most spots with small rises here and there. There were outlines of animals and people and designs made with multi colored rocks of different sizes. They reminded me a little of Navajo sand paintings. There were horses, spiders, a scorpion, faces, swirls, rabbits, dogs, hands, a squirrel, an octopus, fish, numerous crosses, geometric shapes, earth-tone rainbows, cairns and lots of other figures and designs all done in about a 2 acre area. Some of the art was filled in and fully shaded with smaller pebbles. Some were crude, but others were VERY detailed and it must have taken hours or days to gather and place all the stones of the right color and size.
 
 
 
It had been windy all day and after the sun went down it got pretty cold, but that is just how it is in Joshua Tree in the fall and winter. The wind picked up a little and it seemed to grow even colder as the night wore on, so we drank coffee and hot-cocoa while we laughed with Mike and Janet. I had thought about bringing my big warm jacket but decided against it at the very last minute. BIG mistake… I was cold all night. Brauning and I turned in around 11:00. We decided to forgo the tent for that trip and sleep in his Subaru Outback. Man, I am glad we decided on that plan… I got up about 2:00 am to pee (too much coffee around the fire). As I was standing in the cold moonlit desert, I felt a tiny snowflake hit my forehead. I thought ‘Wow, a snowflake. You don’t see that very often in the desert.’ I went back to sleep without thinking another thing about it. When I awoke again the next morning at 8:00 to pee, the car windows were sheathed in white. I though it was odd, but I was only semi-conscious and the possible reasons for this condition didn’t register until I opened the car door and a mound of snow fell into the car. I thought, ‘HOLY SHIT!!’ The whole world had turned white. There was two feet of snow covering everything. I woke Brauning up and after assuring him that I wasn’t making shit up or overreacting, he got up and stared at our new white world with wide-eyed wonder. It hit both of us at the same time - “We have to get out of here NOW! The snow was deep and still coming in sideways; the visibility was something like fifty feet and as the morning wore on more people would try to leave the park and clog the roads.
 
 
 
I am usually the bastion of being prepared. Once a few years ago, I spent the night huddled/cuddling on a rock with three friends in temperatures below freezing with just two space blankets in sandals and short pants. That is all it took. Now I have all sorts of “just in case” gear every time I go out to play. Well I’ll be damned if the one time that I decided not to bring boots and extra clothes if I am not surprised by a blizzard… All I had for shoes was a pair of Teva sandals. Snow + sandals = all bad. I, at least, had some thick wool socks in my pack. Brauning had to shovel the snow off the windows alone because of my lack of preparation (A fact the he reminded me of at least ten times on the drive home that day).

Brauning drove very slowly and carefully out of the campground. Ending up in a ditch during a snow storm would not have been the place to be. The main road was OK and the Subaru had all-wheel drive, so we took the opportunity to let Brauning get familiar with driving on snow and ice. Human beings are very smart creatures, but people when stuck together and faced with a little adversity become blithering idiots! Stupidity was the rule of the day and the road out of the park was littered with speeding two-wheel drive SUVs skidding off the road, guys in old beater cars that were unable to make rational decisions about speed & conditions, stuck snow plows and a ‘mine is bigger- move out of my way’ mentality. Brauning did fine driving and we spent the morning helping the less fortunate get up hills and out of ditches.

At some point before we encountered all the stupidity that morning I realized that I might have to get out of the car and push if we got stuck. I had a shoe-epiphany: Plastic grocery bags. We had some from buying food for the weekend trip, so I took off my sandals, wrapped and tied the bags around my socks and put my Tevas back on and I was good to go for all the car pushing that followed. After we left the park we stopped by the Joshua Tree General Store, across from Nomad Ventures, and my “Bag-Lady Shoes” were a big hit with the assembled crowd. A lady at the store, who was from the area, said that it hadn’t snowed like this in Joshua Tree for 23 years. While it was great to be a part of local history, we just wanted to go back to the warmth of Orange County, which is exactly what we did after a short but fruitless search for espresso.
 
 
 
The storm that brought Joshua Tree snow also dumped snow all over the high country in every part of the state. The ski resorts were undated with powder. Roads all over the state were closed and air travel was a nightmare for a couple of days. We were lucky in Joshua Tree and the weather was more of a laughing diversion for us than anything serious. That was not the case in The Angles National Forrest where a security guard slipped off the road and was trapped in his truck, dying of hypothermia, or in Yosemite National Park where the storm trapped dozens of hikers in the park and seven climbers on El Capitan. Five were rescued, but Japanese climbers, a husband and wife, froze to death on “The Nose” route.

Again, we were very lucky that weekend. Things could have been very bad for us and gone that way very quickly. A couple of lessons that we learned that morning in the park: ALLWAYS take a jacket and boots, no matter how hot you think it will be. Going light is great but not at the expense of comfort or sense, especially when one is car camping. If the weather turns ugly, get to a main road as soon as possible or at least before the idiots start moving around. And… Plastic grocery sacks have 1002 uses…