Los Padres and Joshua Tree part 1

I confess, I am a total planner. Before any big undertaking I tend to draw up numerous lists, do all sorts of internet research, and yes, there are usually even spreadsheets involved. I love a good plan. The funny thing is, as much as I agonize over making the perfect plans, there are times when I delight in breaking them just as much. This is one of those times. But first...the desert!

So I left San Francisco on Thursday morning and headed out to Los Padres National Forest. At first, the campsite seemed not all that impressive. It was kind of small and really close to the road...hard to lose yourself in nature if cars keep flying by..and they did. Also, it seemed the only other inhabitants at this campground were a hippie couple living out of their van who liked to run their generator late into the night and an older gentleman named Bob who seemed to live there permanently in his RV(he functioned as the camp host and collected all of the fees and reminded people of the rules, etc). He seemed friendly enough but I remember thinking as I set my tent up that if I were writing a murder mystery about this campsite, he would totally be the secret murderer that nobody suspects until it's too late. So anyway, at first I was a little grumpy about the campsite. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something furry pop out of a hole in the ground and scurry away and I was instantly delighted. I asked Bob what was living in the ground over there and his answer was 'ground squirrels', which was not the exotic prairie dog/kangaroo rat type thing I was hoping for, but I was excited to see wildlife nonetheless. I watched the ground squirrels for a while and attempted to get a good picture of them but they were very good at disappearing into their burrows when I got close enough for photography. Later that evening I also saw a fox (!) down by the road.

Los Padres was definitely growing on me because of the wildlife, but it was the stars that completely won me over. I had been sitting outside reading Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey all evening with the help of the book light Mom and Dad lent to me (thanks!) and when I started to get sleepy, I just happened to look up and was just struck by the number of stars in the sky. It was incredible, just incredible...a moment that begged to be shared with someone. Unfortunately the only people nearby were Bob, the hippies, and some late-arriving frat boys with their own generator and a giant cooler full of beers. So I enjoyed the stars by myself and then went to bed.

The next day I got to experience even more Los Padres wildlife as I came upon a couple of ant hills on my way to the bathroom that hadn't been there before. I always find it fascinating to watch great numbers of ants as they scurry around on top of each other getting their business done. I soon noticed that a lot of these ants had wings, which creeped me out a bit. Later I saw a million tiny specks flying away from the anthills, so I guess they had business to attend to. Luckily it wasn't the business of attacking me and consuming me from the inside out (I may have seen too many ant-based horror movies as a kid). Los Padres also had its fair share of other bugs, that had all decided to cling to my tent in the night. I hadn't experienced this with either of the other campsites I had been to...must be something specific about that climate that brings out the little bugs. Anyway, I shook off the tent, packed up the car, and headed down to Los Angeles for supplies before going to Joshua Tree. As it turns out, I needn't have bothered to stop because you can get anything you might need in the town of Yucca Valley, less than 20 miles before you get to the park. But I didn't know that, so I ended up getting off the freeway and going to a supermarket in Tarzana for water more sunscreen and other supplies (I had a craving for Pepperidge Farm Milanos for some reason...not the most practical desert food, but okay!).

I finally got to the park, paid my fees and headed off in search of a campsite. The vast majority of sites at Joshua Tree are first come first served, so I had some anxiety that I wouldn't be able to find a good site at the campground I wanted, but it wasn't necessary as there were several good sites left when I got there. The only thing my site didn't have that some of the other occupied sites did was natural shade. Kind of important in the desert. So it's around 3PM, I've just gotten to the park and claimed my site, and naturally the next thing I do is haul everything out and set the tent up. It didn't even occur to me to wait until later when it had cooled down...I was full steam ahead on getting everything squared away. Well, as you can imagine, I was freaking exhausted and roasting by the time I was done. All I wanted to do was get out of the sun somehow. So I pulled the chair into the tent, put batteries in my portable fan that I hadn't even had to use until now, and attempted to relax and read a little. There was a nice breeze outside but I had situated the tent next to a rock in an attempt to hopefully take advantage of natural shade at some other point in the day so the air inside was heavy and hot and not at all breezy, even with the fan.

Eventually I decided that I needed to cool down back to normal before I could be remotely comfortable at my site, so I hopped back in the car and drove around exploring a little bit. Thank god for air conditioning, seriously. Finally I was cooled down enough and enough time had passed to give me a little patch of shade on my site, so I dragged my chair into it and sat down with my book and a giant bottle of water. I read for a while, looking up when other campers drove into the area in search of a good site. Eventually the air was cool enough for me to get up and do a little exploring on foot. In situations like these, I find I'm constantly bumping up against things I believed were entirely off limits to me and realizing those beliefs are entirely false. Case in point: rock climbing. Now I'm not saying I'm going to go buy some crampons and rope and scale the tallest peak in the park (though instantly i'm thinking 'why not?' and wondering what kind of shape I would have to be in to take rock climbing lessons), but I'm certainly capable of doing a little simple climbing. There was a medium sized bank of rock behind my campsite that had a shady ledge that interested me. I thought it might be nice to climb up there and sit on the ledge and read my book some more. I couldn't readily see how to get up to the ledge from where I was at so I walked around the structure to an unoccupied campsite and climbed up from there. I think that's what I liked about it, the systematic problem-solving aspect of it. When I got to the ledge I felt elated and powerful, a big change from how defeated and weak I had felt when I was worn out from the heat. On the way back down I slipped a little and had to catch myself with my hand, giving me a little gravel indentation pattern on my palm for a few minutes. As I sat back in my chair I marveled at it and realized I hadn't felt that particular sting since I was a kid. It was an exhilarating feeling. I climbed up even higher a little later that day and again on the next.

The campsite on my right was occupied by an older couple with a complicated tent and a whole lot of gear, and the campsite to my left seemed like it would remain empty until a whole pack of extra testosterony guys pulled in around 8PM. They were...not quiet. They had also brought with them some kind of gun-type thing (expressly forbidden in the park, btw) that they kept shooting off, well into the night. Some of their conversations were definitely not for the faint of heart (there were a lot of drunk stories and sex stories and drunken sex stories) but they were such caricatures of men I just had to laugh at a number of boneheaded things they had to say. They didn't really quiet down much or stop shooting their gun-type thing all night but luckily the desert heat had wiped me out enough that I was able to sleep through most of it.