Surviving the Desert, Part 1
Desert Survivors take me backpacking in one of their favorite Mojave Desert stomping grounds. This week on The WildeBeat; Surviving the Desert, part one.
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News from the Wildebeat, the audio journal about getting into the wilderness.
This is program number thirty five.
I'm Steve Sergeant. *
STEVE: Last week, Steve Tabor, the president of the Berekley, California outings group, the Desert Survivors, gave us some desert backpacking tips. I had a chance to learn and use those skills myself.
DAVE: Ready for orientation? [and under]
STEVE: We're in a wilderness area of desert to the north of Joshua Tree National Park, called the Sheep Hole Valley Wilderness. Our trailhead is just north of Sheep Hole Pass. To the north and East we see a vast valley. It's dotted with small bushes, but in the distance it looks smooth and nearly flat. Many miles across the valley there's a rocky mountain range. It looks dry, and from this distance, lifeless.
DAVE HALLIGAN: OK. Well, I think we've all met, but I'm Dave Halligan, leading this trip. And I've been in Desert Survivors since nineteen ninety two. My very first trip with Desert Survivors was to these mountains with Steve Tabor, and so this is an interesting place for me to come back to. Equipment, there's nothing really too out of the ordinary for this trip. Temperatures are going to be cooler than usual for this time of year for this area. So maybe mid-fifties in the day, and forties maybe high thirties at night. There's a thirty percent chance of rain predicted for the desert region, so everybody should bring rain pants, rain jacket, hat, rain hat, and a tent. Because temperatures are cooler than normal, you could probably get by with two and a quarter, two and a half gallons. Umm, let's see. Everyone should have boots, everybody should have sun screen, I see everybody's got long pants on, which is good, 'cause there will be cat's claw acacia that we'll be going through. It looks like it's very open country out here, but it's not. It is amazing how you can just go twenty, thirty, forty meters away and not see anybody. Because of the bushes, because of the rocks, because of the terrain. So do try to keep visual contact with somebody in the group. All right, so let's get get our packs together, and put on sun screen. It doesn't seem like it's sunny, but it is, and we'll get going. STEVE: Our route is an arc around the abrupt north end of the Sheep Hole Mountain range. We started out walking along a truck trail. After a while, we come to a gate across the trail. The sign on the gate says, "Wilderness Boundary, vehicles prohibited." The fence ends abruptly a hundred feet or so in each direction. Instead of opening the unlocked gate, we walk around the end of the fence.
Even though the land looks flat from a distance, our route dipped several times into gullies between 3 and 6 feet deep. The walls of these gullies are steep, but not so steep that we can't walk up and down them. [Fade out walking]
After about an hour and a half, we find a wash gully deep enough to make a sheltered campsite. It has a flat, sandy bottom, and good wind shelter. Camping in a wash is often not a good idea, but this one is safe for a couple of reasons. Only a small canyon drains into it, and there's little chance of significant rainfall this weekend. We set up our camp, and then take a lunch break. After lunch, we day-hike down the wash.
Along the way, we see a variety of plants, including desert lupin, smoke tree, cats claw acacia, and many others. We find small caves in the wall of the gully. Our leader's wife, Simone, investigates one of them. SIMONE: Found a home for these rats. Oh yeah, it's a burrow for them. Look's pretty good, looks nice and cool. Kangaroo rats -- yeah, you can see the droppings.
STEVE: But there's droppings for something much larger here too. See?
DAVE: That's coyote. MAN: Maybe the coyote had dinner here.
SIMONE: Umm. Maybe not. I'm not going to stick my hand in there. STEVE: We've hiked for an hour, and now the wash has opened out onto the plain of the Sheep Hole Valley. From our vantage point, the only sign of human impact visible around us is a railroad track through the valley, over ten miles away, and a jet contrail in the sky. After a snack and water break there in the shade of a large creosote bush, we retrace our steps back to camp.
[Fade-in stove background]
Happy hour begins as soon as we unpack our provisions. Wine and tequila make the rounds of the kitchen area. A relaxed cooking and dining session follows, lasting until after dark. Some of us brought conventional dehydrated backpacking food. But others brought fresh food, and food items that still contain a lot of water. After all, since we have to carry all of our water anyway, what difference does it make that some of it is in the food we brought? I thought it might be hard to be really frugal with water, but it really wasn't. DAVE: Tomorrow I want to get up early, get going as soon as we can. Just as soon as it's getting light I'll get going. We probably have a six-to-eight hour round-trip day hike tomorrow. We're going to have to go up and over a little ridge -- this. It's not going to be that rocky, and then down and then up to the mountain. So it'll be a full day. We didn't make the peak in ninety two because we selected a route that was somewhat difficult and I've selected a route that's going to be easier I think, based on everything I know to date. It's the route the Sierra club takes when they go up to the peak. STEVE: The temperature dropped abruptly at sunset. Everyone was in down jackets by five thirty. The conversation winds down, and we retire to the relative warmth of our bedding by seven.
The night is intensely quiet. I awake during the night, and hear the blood, rushing through my ears. That's interrupted occasionally by wind gusts that cause the tent fly to flap. I hear the screech of an occasional owl, and at one point, the low throbbing of a train.
In the morning, our gully is still shady after sunrise. After an expedient breakfast, we gather our gear for the ambitious day hike.
The route is steep. We climb over a saddle near our camp site, to the opposite side of the mountain range. The hillside is loose rock and sand.
Over the saddle, we walk down one shallow wash, and up another.
DAVE: We're going to continue on the flat wash here until we get to the base of the gully. You can see where the sun's shining on the rocks, then we're just going to continue up the gully that heads a little bit back toward the left. And then it's about a two thousand foot climb to the crest of the mountains and then we'll just continue on the crest. The crest is supposed to be fairly easy for about a mile, and then a little boulder scramble to the summit. Sheephole Mountain, it's about forty nine hundred foot elevation. Should be very nice views of Joshua Tree National Park to the south, and the Mojave desert to the east.
STEVE: The remainder of the climb is a hands and feet scramble. I stow my dangling audio gear into my backpack, so that I can climb.
STEVE: In part two, the trip continues to the top of Sheep Hole Mountain.
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Next time -- part two of Surviving the Desert.
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This has been The WildeBeat, program number thirty five. Thank you for listening.
