April 3 2008

Dan wrote:

April 3 2008

We had a nice walk through the cholla garden.

We spent the Monday and Tuesday nights in Joshua Tree National Park at the Jumbo Rocks campground.  The campground was simply incredible.  Our campsite was encompassed by a wonderful little 30 ft. outcropping of rock.  The rock was steep enough that it didn’t tempt the kids to bolder much higher than they should.  So it made a wonderful little boundary where the kids could play freely.  On the way into the park I stopped at a rock climbing store and picked up an ascender to enable self belay.  Monday night we set up a top rope for the family home evening activity.  The route I setup was too hard for the kids so I mostly was pulling them up but they had fun doing that anyway.  Tuesday was pretty much a plain school and work day.  It is nice to finally be doing some work on the game.  I am about three days into development and I am very pleased with how things are going.

Wednesday is our play day.  We decided to go for another rock climbing route.  We went over to some rocks near the Hidden Valley campground.  I was moderately regretting not buying a climbing guide when we were in town, I had picked up 4 or 5 and set them down again deciding to be frugal.  It turned out it wasn’t very hard to find somewhere to climb.  I picked a route that I thought I could without a rope thinking that would be about the right level for the kids and I experimented with a self belayed lead.  I didn’t come up with a technique I liked for a self belayed lead but I had fun experimenting.  The kids got farther on the rock on Wednesday than they did on Monday but still not as far as they would have liked.  I am going to need to be less aggressive when choosing routes for them in the future.  All the same Lexie and the kids had fun and I had a sensational time.  It felt really good to be out on rock and extremely liberating to figure out a solution to rock climbing with the kids.  For top roping the self belay has a couple of nice features in that you don’t need to worry about weather or not your belayer is paying attention (I have never had a problem with this but I have heard stories) and you don’t have anyone directly under you in case you do happen to kick a rock down.

Ty and Dallin enjoyed reading on the rock.

The kids loved having a campfire

I somehow managed to lose my camera so image quality has suffered as I have been using my "side arm" the phone camera.  There really aren't that many places it could be in the trailer but the trailer does have a way of making things disappear.

We are just outside of the park now.  There is some BLM land that we can park on for free so we decided to take advantage of it.  If the land was closer to rock climbing it would be perfect.  There is some more BLM land north of the park that is off a dirt road.  After my experience getting the trailer stuck at Bear Lake I am very wary of taking the trailer off pavement.  The Suburban isn’t very powerful and the trailer sucks it down like an anchor. Having spent our play day and will be heading east to visit with Jen (my sister in law) in Phoenix.