Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Photos from Joshua Tree
I've written about this hike before and posted some photos, so there will be some repetition, but I'm not inclined to try and do an edit.
Joshua Tree During the Shutdown
I made a brief stop at Joshua Tree National Park during the just ended government shutdown and it wasn't pretty.
Before driving up into the park proper I went to a local supermarket to buy a few snacks to carry with me on my hike. I asked the cashier if business was down because of the shutdown. According to her, no, just the opposite. Business was really booming. She also told me that she was one of the local volunteers who was picking up trash and cleaning restrooms and she wasn't happy. Lots of reports of gunfire, especially at night. She told me that the group she was working with had found a lot of off road vehicle tracks as well.
"What are they shooting?" she wondered. "There's nothing to hunt up there but big horn sheep and they're protected. Are they just blasting away at stuff?"
It wasn't long before I was wondering the same thing myself. I went to the trail head parking lot for the California Hiking and Riding Trail off of Key's View Road. As I changed out of my sneakers and into my hiking boots, a group of about six or seven men walked into the lot. I'd guess that their ages ranged from mid to late teens to mid thirties. They all had jackets on and all had backpacks. As they pulled off their jackets and started loading their stuff into a couple of cars I noticed they all had side arms. I'm not an expert on hand guns, but just from watching television I could tell that they were semi-automatics with removable clips. One of the younger men opened up his backpack and pulled out a shotgun. I watched as he pulled empty shells from a holder attached to the stock and threw them on the ground, so clearly he had been shooting at something. Another man pulled an assault style rifle from his pack. I didn't stick around as the other members of their group started digging into their packs. I wasn't worried about being shot, but I was amazed that they made absolutely no effort to hide that they had been out shooting in a national park.
The California Hiking and Riding Trail is neither difficult to walk nor does it require any great route finding skills. The Keys View Road parking area picks it up somewhere near the mid point and I decided to head west away from the paved road. It's not long after the parking lot that it goes over a not steep rise, descends and continues on in a gentle up-slope for a few miles. Passing plenty of Joshua Trees, and between two mountain ridges it's more of a very broad open valley with expansive, 360 degree views.
Joshua Tree is too near Los Angeles, Orange County and Palm Springs to allow for people free hiking. I've been going out there for years and I've always passed at least a few people on the trail. I once walked there in a huge snow storm and I still passed other hikers. The first group of people I met, coming from the opposite direction, were what I would expect from a national park. An older woman and two younger men. We more or less acknowledged each other with a quick nodding of heads and we all went on about our business. I didn't ask them if they had seen anything out of the ordinary and they didn't ask me anything. If they had I would have told them to look down. Ever since I had got on the trail proper I had noticed tire tracks in the sandy trail. They were too wide for a mountain bike, so they had to be dirt bikes. I had also seen two very thin tire tracks, side by side about three feet apart. I couldn't think of any explanation other than someone hauling a cart. But more on that latter.
As the angle of the trail started to tick up a bit, with juniper trees becoming more common, I hit a ridge line above a deep, broad canyon. I followed the trail as it started down. Steeper than anything I had already walked, but not to the point of being difficult to walk. I got to the bottom, followed the easy to follow trail through some brush, and started up the other side. One of the problems with Joshua Tree is that the times of the year, when it's cool enough to hike through the desert, also has the shortest days. I knew I wasn't going to walk all the way to the top of the other side of the canyon, but the trail has markers every mile, so I just decided to get to a point that would allow a fourteen mile day. Just before I got to my turnaround point I ran into another hiker. Sitting against a rock, listening to his headphones, and eating a sandwich, I decided to ask him if he had noticed anything different about a park without rangers. He told me that he had spent the previous night at one of the park campgrounds. People had been showing up, reservations in hand, expecting to spend the night in an reserved spot, only to find that someone had already made camp.
"People were shouting at each other, There was some shoving, and a couple of fist fights." he said. "But hey, there's no one to complain to." He also told me that quiet time wasn't enforced and a couple of RV's worth of folks were really partying well past midnight.
After a pleasant and uneventful walk back to my car, I started the drive back to L.A. There was an awful lot of traffic that was pretty much as it would have been had the park been officially open and fully staffed. I could see the rock climbers loading up their ropes and padding and saw all the tourists wandering around the roadside parking areas. Apart from the large and growing mounds of garbage around trash cans that wouldn't get emptied until local volunteers swung by, it really was just like any ordinary weekend.
It wasn't late enough for a full dinner so I decided to hit the local McDonald's to feed my Dr. Pepper addiction. I pulled into the lot, parked, and as I walked towards the door, I saw it. A pickup truck, it's bed full of desert plants. And, a two wheeled cart. Mystery solved.
Before driving up into the park proper I went to a local supermarket to buy a few snacks to carry with me on my hike. I asked the cashier if business was down because of the shutdown. According to her, no, just the opposite. Business was really booming. She also told me that she was one of the local volunteers who was picking up trash and cleaning restrooms and she wasn't happy. Lots of reports of gunfire, especially at night. She told me that the group she was working with had found a lot of off road vehicle tracks as well.
"What are they shooting?" she wondered. "There's nothing to hunt up there but big horn sheep and they're protected. Are they just blasting away at stuff?"
It wasn't long before I was wondering the same thing myself. I went to the trail head parking lot for the California Hiking and Riding Trail off of Key's View Road. As I changed out of my sneakers and into my hiking boots, a group of about six or seven men walked into the lot. I'd guess that their ages ranged from mid to late teens to mid thirties. They all had jackets on and all had backpacks. As they pulled off their jackets and started loading their stuff into a couple of cars I noticed they all had side arms. I'm not an expert on hand guns, but just from watching television I could tell that they were semi-automatics with removable clips. One of the younger men opened up his backpack and pulled out a shotgun. I watched as he pulled empty shells from a holder attached to the stock and threw them on the ground, so clearly he had been shooting at something. Another man pulled an assault style rifle from his pack. I didn't stick around as the other members of their group started digging into their packs. I wasn't worried about being shot, but I was amazed that they made absolutely no effort to hide that they had been out shooting in a national park.
The California Hiking and Riding Trail is neither difficult to walk nor does it require any great route finding skills. The Keys View Road parking area picks it up somewhere near the mid point and I decided to head west away from the paved road. It's not long after the parking lot that it goes over a not steep rise, descends and continues on in a gentle up-slope for a few miles. Passing plenty of Joshua Trees, and between two mountain ridges it's more of a very broad open valley with expansive, 360 degree views.
Joshua Tree is too near Los Angeles, Orange County and Palm Springs to allow for people free hiking. I've been going out there for years and I've always passed at least a few people on the trail. I once walked there in a huge snow storm and I still passed other hikers. The first group of people I met, coming from the opposite direction, were what I would expect from a national park. An older woman and two younger men. We more or less acknowledged each other with a quick nodding of heads and we all went on about our business. I didn't ask them if they had seen anything out of the ordinary and they didn't ask me anything. If they had I would have told them to look down. Ever since I had got on the trail proper I had noticed tire tracks in the sandy trail. They were too wide for a mountain bike, so they had to be dirt bikes. I had also seen two very thin tire tracks, side by side about three feet apart. I couldn't think of any explanation other than someone hauling a cart. But more on that latter.
As the angle of the trail started to tick up a bit, with juniper trees becoming more common, I hit a ridge line above a deep, broad canyon. I followed the trail as it started down. Steeper than anything I had already walked, but not to the point of being difficult to walk. I got to the bottom, followed the easy to follow trail through some brush, and started up the other side. One of the problems with Joshua Tree is that the times of the year, when it's cool enough to hike through the desert, also has the shortest days. I knew I wasn't going to walk all the way to the top of the other side of the canyon, but the trail has markers every mile, so I just decided to get to a point that would allow a fourteen mile day. Just before I got to my turnaround point I ran into another hiker. Sitting against a rock, listening to his headphones, and eating a sandwich, I decided to ask him if he had noticed anything different about a park without rangers. He told me that he had spent the previous night at one of the park campgrounds. People had been showing up, reservations in hand, expecting to spend the night in an reserved spot, only to find that someone had already made camp.
"People were shouting at each other, There was some shoving, and a couple of fist fights." he said. "But hey, there's no one to complain to." He also told me that quiet time wasn't enforced and a couple of RV's worth of folks were really partying well past midnight.
After a pleasant and uneventful walk back to my car, I started the drive back to L.A. There was an awful lot of traffic that was pretty much as it would have been had the park been officially open and fully staffed. I could see the rock climbers loading up their ropes and padding and saw all the tourists wandering around the roadside parking areas. Apart from the large and growing mounds of garbage around trash cans that wouldn't get emptied until local volunteers swung by, it really was just like any ordinary weekend.
It wasn't late enough for a full dinner so I decided to hit the local McDonald's to feed my Dr. Pepper addiction. I pulled into the lot, parked, and as I walked towards the door, I saw it. A pickup truck, it's bed full of desert plants. And, a two wheeled cart. Mystery solved.
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