Intro

The topography of California’s Joshua Tree National Park is deceptively complex. Driving through the park or hiking one of its most popular trails, you can see across the landscape for miles, and what you see is mostly sloping plains dotted by Joshua trees and boulder archipelagos, with mountains ringing the periphery. It seems impossible that anyone could disappear on a day hike and never be found again. But it happens. They do. And the reason is that on a smaller, more intimate scale, Joshua Tree is a jumble of high-grit granite, prickly flora, dead-end canyons, ankle-breaking crevices, and keeper caves. The most interesting objectives don’t have trails and getting from point A to B often requires several alphabets of exploration.

One day last spring, I headed out to JT with an ambitious plan to scramble up three of the park’s highest peaks, spread out over many miles. Not wanting to waste time with route-finding, I’d downloaded a GPS track from a climbing site,