Joshua Tree in April

Last weekend, we took off for our monthly climbing trip in Joshua Tree. Our destination was in the Lost Horse Area on the Freeway Wall. The weather was pleasant. Not too hot or too cold. Spring is here. There were some beautiful flowers out but it looks like we missed the big flower showing by about a week or two at the most. It looked like the flowers were just about to burst forth on a lot of the plants.

We did not do any hard technical routes. We found some easy adventurous climbs to play on. Our first climb is called Barney Rubble. It is an easy-ish route up some loose blocks.

It was just challenging enough to keep it interesting, but overall it was kind of a fun little climb.

Next, we attempted to go up Smooth as Silk, but it was a bit more than we bargained for, so we abandoned the attempt for now. It was a moderately difficult route up a small finger crack on a slab that was, well, as smooth as silk. 

We moved on to our next climb. Unfortunately, with the nice weather, comes rattlesnake season. We climbed across this boulder field to get to our next climb which is on the other side of the wall that we were on and Christian was scouting up ahead. He had just climbed up past this nice flat rock and on his way back down to where we were, this rattlesnake popped up. You cannot even see it from the rock above as you are about to step back down. His head was facing out, ready to strike. Christian had just climbed up this rock a minute or two ago so he was pretty shocked that it was sitting there sunning itself when he came back. It freaked us out a bit and we knew that we had to be extra vigilant now.

Our next adventure was on a route called False False Smooth as Silk (not to be confused with False Smooth as Silk which was 30' to the left of this climb).

This was another easy fun route. Although the moves were not very difficult, you had to climb out on a runout slab (thankfully not as smooth as silk). So the exposure definitely kept you on your toes.

By the time we all finished this climb, the sun was starting to get low in the sky and we did not want to get caught up in the boulder fields without enough light to see the rattle snakes, so we called it a day. Christian went down to clean the pieces and I stayed up on top to take down the anchor and started to head down, but Christian came back up and we took a walk up to the top of Filipino Wall since we were up there.

On our way down, we found a neat little nook that might be used in a pinch to bivouac if we needed to. We then collected the kids and headed back down to the truck for some dinner and then home.