Fri, Dec 4, 2020
|
With: | Karl Fieberling |
Ryan Burd | |
Iris Ma | |
Tom Grundy |
It had been a year since Ryan had done any hiking or climbing with Dad, and the first time either of my kids had joined me in the desert, so I was a little excited to have him along with the rest of us. Ryan had originally planned to do some camping in Joshua Tree with a friend, but his buddy had contracted the coronavirus (or at least believed he had and was awaiting test results), leaving Ryan stranded. So I suggested he join my party on the other side of the park and was happy that he took me up on the offer. We were climbing in the Coxcomb Mtns today, one of my favorite desert ranges. The terrain in the northern half of the range is steep, rough, and filled with grainy granite boulders, rock and an abundance of class 3 scrambling. The summits often have difficult blocks that make summiting far from assured. Today I was after a quartet of summits in a 10mi loop that would prove to be too ambitious. We would do well to get to the first two, leaving the others for another day.
We began the hike around 7:20a, starting from the north along SR62
where there are turnouts on both sides of the road for ample parking. There is
a cell tower on the north side that makes navigating back to the cars at the
end of the day a cinch. The hike starts with more than three miles across
the desert flats
to reach the base of the mountains, where "flat" is somewhat of an illusion,
involving almost 1,000ft of hardly-perceptible elevation gain. Along the way
we found the rusty remains of a tank mortar round, a heavy piece of steel shot
from a WWII tank back when Patton was training his army for desert warfare in
the early 1940s. Half-buried in the ground, we retrieved it,
examined it, and left it
standing in the desert for the next
unsuspecting visitor to find. About an hour and a quarter after starting out,
we came to
the end of the easy hiking where the desert floor abuts the
Coxcomb Range. We had to
downclimb a steep section of loose ground in
order to
reach the start of a narrow wash we would follow up for much
of the next hour.
Unlike gullies in other desert ranges, here there is much
class 3 scrambling with
large blocks crowding the route, then
short breaks of
flat sand, followed by more boulder fun. After weaving
about through the drainage, heading west then south, we eventually started
climbing out of the gully when less than half a mile from our first
summit. With a myriad of closely-spaced pinnacles to choose from, it was
impossible to pick out the highest one
from below, relying instead on
our GPSr to get us close enough to allow us to determine this for ourselves. As
usual, the scrambling gets harder the higher one climbs towards a summit here,
and this was no exception. We reached
a notch just north of the
summit by two different means, looking up and still unable to identify the
highpoint only a hundred yards away now. I tried one route along the edge of
a fin that might have worked if it hadn't been for a large catclaw tree directly
blocking my efforts. I might have forced my way through it, painful and
annoying as it would have been, if the others had not shown better progress in
a trough just to my right. Karl watched from the notch as Tom made the route
work, despite some terribly steep and crumbly sections to work through. While
Karl decided it was too spicy for his liking, I retreated from my fin to join
the trough using a connecting ledge. Ryan was just
ahead of me,
apologizing as he
knocked several baseballs loose from their mooring. I decided to duck out of
the way and let him finish his manuevers above me. In turn, Iris would wait
below for me to follow through this section.
The highpoint turns out to be a 10-foot blade of rock atop a surprisingly roomy
summit area. While three of us wandered around taking pictures, Tom took the
first crack at the summit block, a low class 5 effort up it's East
Face. With only room for one person
on top at a time, we took turns,
myself going second and
Iris third. Ryan didn't have any strong need
to do the summit block and left it untested. In all, we spent about 20min at
the summit, leaving
a register before starting down. While Iris and
Tom went off to explore a possible descent off the west side, Ryan and I
returned back down
the north side trough
after finding no other reasonable possibilities. I called out to Karl, but he
had already left the notch. Seems he backtracked to a lower saddle on the east
side of the peak and spent some time there. Iris and Tom had little luck
descending off the west side, so eventually scrambled back up to return via the
northside trough. We could hear their voices echoing around the canyon walls
but could not tell from what direction they were coming from. Ryan and I
thought they had gotten ahead of us as we we went around the west and
south sides of the summit before finding our way to
the deep gully leading towards
the second peak to the southeast. Meanwhile, Iris and Tom had come across Karl
lounging at the saddle. Karl would return back down the way we'd come to the
vehicles while the other two eventually got themselves to the southeast side
of the first peak and down to the sandy bottom of the drainage. Ryan and I had
already
started up out of the gully when we spotted them far below,
giving us a big lead.
The terrain continued to be challenging with
plenty of class 3
scrambling and non-obvious route-finding, but none of the more difficult stuff
we'd found on the first peak. Karl could have done this one. It would take
Ryan and I over an hour and a half to cover the one mile distance
between summits,
Tom and Iris about ten minutes longer. Though slightly
lower, Peak 3,251ft had better views with a nice one to
the south
overlooking the basin separating the
two main halves of the range. We spent another twenty minutes on this
second summit as well, Iris sharing summit candy again while
appreciating
the views. Barbara and Gordon had been to the summit in
1978 but we were unable to find the expected register. We left
a second one
of ours here before starting down.
By now it approaching 1p and a quick tally of our progress suggested we would
be returning by headlamp if we continued on to the third summit, another two
miles to the east. It was time to head back.
We descended to the east, aiming for a side wash that would take us back to the
main one we had initially ascended. The descent went down through more
boulder jumble,
some brush, a
neat tunnel and
general fun, taking about 45min to reach the easier going in
the wash. We followed this out for another half hour to reach the
wider,
sandier gully. We found
a small stash of climbing bolts
and
hangers, a battery pack for a cordless drill and several gallons of water that
looked to have been lying there at least a few years, judging by the sand that
hand partially washed over it. We left the water and took the other items,
then continued out to the wider drainage. It would take us more than an hour
to recross the 3mi of
open desert, but we were in no rush - we would
get back
around 3p, well before sunset and leaving us plenty of time to find camp for
the night.
We found Karl lounging about his Element with all the doors open. He had
napped on his way back and did not get back that long before us. In fact, it
was Iris' text to him that got him moving again from his desert-induced
complacency. Keith Christensen had driven by on the highway sometime during
the day, and recognizing my jeep (or perhaps the license plate) had
left a note
on the windshield. Would have been fun to meet him out here in person.
We drove our vehicles east to the junction with SR177, then south along the
eastern edge of Joshua Tree and the Colorado River Aqueduct. A good service
road lead west from the highway for several miles to the aqueduct where it goes
into a tunnel through the Coxcomb Mtns. We found a huge flat area here that
made an excellent campsite for the next few nights - several fire rings, a
flagpole, a port-a-potty and an inexhaustable supply of fresh water. What more
could one ask for?
Continued...
This page last updated: Fri Dec 11 09:04:40 2020
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