Fleeing LA

You would think we would have made it a little further into the trip before our first confrontation with the police, but here we are getting rousted out of our campsite by the local sheriff.  Never mind that we had paid the $10 camping fee and were at a state campground surrounded by at least 50 unoccupied sites.  Our sin was that we were in a “group” campground, reserved for large groups.  The fact that none had chosen to stay there that night was irrelevant, as was my argument that the Babe and I were a group, albeit a small one.  Ah, the bureaucratic mind at work; I know it well after a career working with the FDA and Military.  God forbid that one of them might have to weigh all of the facts and make a decision in the best interest of all parties, versus mindlessly going down the list and checking the box.

It was 9:58 PM and we really didn’t want to break down our tent and move, but when I asked him how much the fine was to stay I knew we were leaving: $400.  The cop informed us that there was another campground for small parties, but it closed at 10:00 and was a 20 minute drive away.  Thanks for that tip.  At least in Mexico we could have bribed him.  Here in Southern California the cop politely refused my offer.

That took us to the nearest hotel in Perris.  The seediness of the place started to sink in when the older East Indian woman with a foul temper told me they only took cash, and that I also needed to leave a $5 key deposit.  A key deposit?  During the 5 minutes I spent unloading the car after paying for the room, two couples came up to get their deposits before walking off in the distance.  You got it, local office park for the area’s prostitutes.  After seeing Babe, and watching me unload the car, the old woman decided to “upgrade” us to a different room and had me pull my car into a spot right in front of the office.  Comforting.  We slept with a loaded .44 next to the bed.

Babe and I had left LA that morning after spending two nights with Jon.  He had needed the company of an old friend to help heal from the pain of his brother, and we enjoyed getting to spend time with him and his teenage son and daughter, Christian and Naomi.  They proved that it is still possible to raise two wonderful, talented kids in the middle of LA despite an extremely nasty divorce.  The Catholic schools they both attend must have helped, along with at least one very involved parent.

Babe had passed the ground school test for her private pilot’s license the day before after studying for months.  She was relieved and quite pleased despite her test score of 72 (70 is the minimum passing score).  Of course, given the competitive nature of our relationship, she is going to have to live forever with the knowledge that I scored 98 after a 2 ½ day crash course 20 years earlier.  Please remind her of that when you see her.

We were both very happy to get out of LA.  Even though I travel there constantly for business and happen to like the place, I was seeing it through different eyes this time.  The crushing, omnipresent traffic is dehumanizing.  There is no way either of us could live with that on a daily basis.  Beyond that is a ubiquitous lack of civility and patience.  People were honking constantly at the slightest offense (turning right into a parking lot when the person behind you was in a hurry).  Whatever you think of Rudy Giuliani, he helped make New York a more humane place when he started issuing tickets for honking.  Although I might be able to live downtown in a city like Barcelona, one thing I have already confirmed on this trip is that we both prefer small towns.

Jon convinced us to go with him to his “local” crag, Big Rock at Lake Perris state park, instead of traveling directly to Joshua Tree.  That turned out to be a good choice.  It is a small but wonderful granite crag in an idyllic desert setting that features bolted sport routes on excellent rock.  Jon steered me toward one of his favorite climbs, a 5.7 face climb with a 5.9 start that I found somewhat desperate; a tough warm-up for sure.  Babe went second and was getting nowhere on it.  Climbing is all about footwork, and unlike gym climbing where there is always a decent handhold available, this climb didn’t have any.  What handholds existed weren’t much good for anything but helping with your balance, and the footholds consisted of nothing more than surface irregularities.  In order to make progress you had to smear up on to the ball of your foot, keeping all of your weight loaded on about one square inch of rubber.  That requires you to keep your heels low, which requires you to keep your knees and butt away from the rock when instinct is beckoning you to hug the rock.  After trying and failing repeatedly to make any progress, resulting in cursing that I had never heard from her before, Babe started to listen to the coaching from Jon and a local hard man named Craig.  Once she got it, up she went.  By the end of the day, several pitches later, she was dancing up the thin faces.   

After warming up on the first pitch I managed to send (climber term for climb in good style), a very thin 5.11B pitch with a runout (no protection available) upper section.  The crux was working my way up the thinnest of smears on vertical rock with no positive handholds to a small seam about ½” wide and 1 ½” long, just big enough for two fingertips.  It felt like a bucket (great handhold) at the time.  The trick was matching my right foot to my hand on the hold and standing up to clip the next bolt. 

This was a surprise.  I hoped to be leading at this level by the end of the trip, not the beginning.  But I have lost 10 pounds since leaving work, and developed good hand strength and calluses after a week of climbing at Red Rocks outside of Vegas with my youngest (18) son Kevin during Spring break in late March.  I would have not even attempted the climb if Jon hadn’t pointed me to it and neglected to tell me the rating.  He flew up it, and climbed fluidly all day (that's him below).  Babe resorted to French free climbing this pitch (using the slings clipped to the bolts for handholds) after being instructed to do so by Jon.  It turned out to be an important first day on the rock, as Babe learned some critical lessons that she will need for the rest of the trip. 

 

The best part about the day was meeting and sharing a beer with some local climbers in their early 20’s, relatively new to the sport but very enthusiastic.  I was psyched by their youthful exuberance, and they were inspired by an old guy climbing the local test piece; a fair trade.  That is one of the great things about climbing, whitewater boating and every other adventure sport.  The community of people participating in them is typically intelligent, interesting, friendly and social.  A far cry from the fat, sallow smokers sitting on a stool pulling a slot machine lever for hours in Vegas.  Red state, blue state? 

Onward to Joshua Tree, passing the wind farms along the way.  Their symmetry and Terminator like presence have always fascinated me.  Oh, did I mention the weather?  Cloudless, 83 degrees, no humidity, gentle breeze.

Escaping Ashland

Hitting the Road

Laid off after helping build another great company staffed with wonderful people.  Never much for corporate politics I am leaving with no regrets.  I've left great teams behind so I'm not even worried about their ability to cope once they are forced to make the tough decisions.  What's a guy to do?  A nine-week rock climbing holiday, Bandito style, around the the western USA and Canada sounds like the cure for what ails me.

Two hours and twelve minutes.  That’s how long it took to cover the last 200 miles before stopping to switch drivers in the middle of nowhere California on the way to LA.  It sucks going this slow but the Cessna T-210 is long gone, a casualty of divorce and putting two sons through college.  This is a Bandito climbing holiday and the last two were taken via the trusty Centurion:  five weeks to Baffin Island to climb Mt. Asgard in the Canadian Arctic with John Harlin and the same length trip to climb throughout Mexico with Tim O’Neill.  There is nothing quite like seeing the world through the lens of a single-engine airplane.  This nine-week excursion is to some of the world’s top climbing destinations in the North American West, however, will be by car.

Aargh!  Guess we’ll have to make the best of it.  Avoiding the revenue parasites otherwise known as state police is the worst priority, and California has the worst of them.  We are armed with a 2011 Audi S4 equipped with a Passport 9500ci radar detector that is hidden in the grill and rearview mirror.  Formidable but not foolproof.  For sure it goes at least 162 (don't ask), but that doesn’t do much to help get past the truck going 54 in the left lane passing another truck going 53 in the right lane.  In my youth I would have just passed them on one of the shoulders but those days are long gone, I think. 

I realize that I’m probably destined for hell given my proclivity to waste petrol, but most days of the year I walk everywhere.  So goes the rationalization.  My grandfather, who had the same affliction (characterized by no increase in the pulse rate when viewing the flashing lights in the rear view mirror), provided me with another rationalization when I pay for more speeding tickets than all of the other people I know combined.  “Jeff”, he used to say when getting pulled over by the coppers, “I’m not even paying them the interest on what I owe them.”

Ted Bruce, Idaho wheat farmer and the best grandfather a boy could have.  He was definitely a Bandito, living life full tilt with few regrets.  Making lots of mistakes, not afraid of them and hopefully learning from the important ones.

We are on our way to hook up with Jon Williams, one of my pre-Bandito climbing partners from the 70’s and 80’s.  I called him out of the blue a few minutes ago.  Although we have had little contact these past several years it was as if no time passed, and the timing couldn’t have been more poignant.  His brother had just died unexpectedly.  A good man that all loved and Jon worshipped.  In the unexplainable connectivity that binds us all together, Jon needed to be pulled from his despair by a kindred spirit that has always and will always have his back.  We will be crashing at his place in Encino tonight.

The climbing Banditos were formed in late 1978 when I convinced Stan Mish and Glenn Rink (aka Little Buddy or LB) to climb the 2,000 foot high volcanic plug known as Shiprock in northwest New Mexico.  They needed some persuasion.  The climb is illegal due to its location on the Navajo Indian Reservation.  Climbing is banned there for religious reasons.  Unless, of course, you are willing to fork over great sums of money for a permit whereas it suddenly becomes somehow less sacred.  Kinda Mormon of them.

No sweat I told my soon to become Bandito partners.  We avoid getting caught by leaving my VW Rabbit at the base with the doors and windows open and scattering empty beer cans around the car to make it look like we were locals.  That strategy had worked a few months earlier during a failed attempt to climb Shiprock after my two partners at the time refused to continue past the first two pitches (a pitch is the climbing between belay points, typically 25-60 meters long).  They had suffered bad dreams the night before and freaked out.  My own dreams had me running into an Indian medicine man all night long that continually sent me the wrong way.  In my dreams I never completed the climb because I couldn’t find my partners.  From that point on I always approached climbing on the Res with a great deal of humility in my heart.  Breaking the law is one thing, messing with Navajo gods was something else again.

I first met my Bandito partners while hiking into Granite Mountain for a day of climbing with Jon.  Investigating a loud commotion in a thicket we encountered two troll like creatures grappling in the dirt with fierce intensity and smiles on their faces: Stan and LB.  Jon introduced us and I knew instantly that I had found partners worthy of Shiprock.

The picture below with the LSD fueled shit eating grins was taken in 1978, the morning after we climbed it on a glorious fall day.  We ran up the climb and the Banditos were born that day.  During the manic ride home to Flagstaff, Arizona we stopped by Monument Valley to scope out our next illegal quest, the Totem Pole.  Cameron Burns chronicled a few Bandito exploits in his book Postcards from the Trailer Park.  He described some of our infamous parties as wild psychedelic events characterized by dragging women by the hair into the bush for sex.  Let me correct Cameron here and now: we didn’t have to drag any of them. 

My main climbing partner for this holiday is a Bandito in training, Lori Edelstein (aka the Babe).  She is a 52-year old woman who started climbing when she met me a couple years earlier.  After several days in the climbing gym learning the ropes (pun intended), she cut her teeth on some trad routes at Castle Crag, Smith Rock and Little Cottonwood Canyon (CA, OR, UT respectively).  That’s her below in a familiar pose.  Yes, she is a very naughty girl, one of the many stellar attributes that make her an excellent recruit.  You can add irreverent, spontaneous, fun-loving, funny, generous, loving, stoic and adventurous to her list of qualifications.  That she is an outstanding athlete, closet porn star and beautiful doesn’t hurt.  Probably her only character flaw is that she is madly in love with me.  Having learned a few things after nearly 50 years of chasing women, I make sure she knows every single day, repeatedly, that she is the most important person in my life.  Whether it just took getting older or finding the perfect woman is uncertain, maybe a bit of both.  But for the first time in my life I’m not looking; there is nothing I would change about her.  Well maybe one thing, she drives too damn fast.

Babe is a stud, prepared to spend most of the next nine weeks living out of a tent even though she has only ever camped out a handful of days.  Joshua Tree is the planned first climbing destination after stopping in LA to see her middle son and taking the ground school test for her private pilot’s license.   We then plan to climb throughout Arizona and Utah before heading over to Yosemite and Tuolumne.  From there, our “itinerary” such as it is, takes us to City of Rocks and Squamish before hitting Smith and Leavenworth on the way home.  What actually happens…?