Arizona and California

Emily (scroll down for Dan's perspective):

It's been an awesome two weeks since we left Cochise Stronghold in Arizona! Time is flying by and I can't believe it's already been about a month since we left Ottawa.

After leaving Cochise, we headed into to Tuscon, AZ to check out out Saguaro National Park and Mount Lemmon. It was raining when we arrived, but we decided to venture into Saguaro National Park to do a little hike, and were rewarded with a full rainbow while marvelling at the giant Saguaro cacti for our first time.

For the next few days, we camped out at Mt Lemmon where we did some climbing. It was pretty neat to drive up the mountain and feel/ see the temperature and topography change with altitude. At the bottom it was pretty warm with cacti everywhere. At the top there was snow and pine trees!

I was especially excited to get to Lemmon so I could practice falling!

Fear is an interesting thing. While fear is super helpful to us survive, it‘s also suuuper annoying. Often climbers (and most people) are afraid of falling, particularily when lead climbing (lead climbing is when the climber clips their rope into protection as they ascend the climbing route). In modern-day sport climbing, falling when climbing is typically quite safe. Yet, many of us get the shaky legs when we move above the bolt.

Since I started climbing 5-ish years ago, I have struggled big time with fear when lead climbing. This is especially interesting given I spent a significant chunk of my life falling on ice with pointy steel blades on my feet! I think at some point I just decided that I was a naturally fearful person who was going to forever be afraid to fall. This negative mindset slowly grew and infected my general climbing confidence (as insecurity tends to do!). Well, a few months ago I wasn't enjoying climbing as much and took a hard look at how I was talking to myself when I was failing or getting a bit scared. As you probably guessed - the results weren't good! I did some research and made a plan to practice falling on our trip.

Let me tell you, fall practice was a super great experience. I started taking teeny tiny falls and worked up to taking much bigger ones. To my surprise - it was super fun!!!

My fear certainly isn't gone, but this was an amazing start, and a great lesson on how things that I think are "fixed" ("I am naturally fearful"), can be addressed with some practice.

As for Mt Lemmon itself, it was stunning and the climbing was pretty fun, but Dan and I just didn't feel a pull towards the place. So after a few days of climbing, we decided to pack up and head to Joshua Tree National Park in California!

Something I have yet to mention (and something that I'm always struck by when travelling in the US), is the amount of massive billboards everywhere. Most of the billboards are advertising fast food, religious messaging and personal injury lawyers. My personal favourite was: "Overcome by LUST?! Call 1-800-TRUTH". The rest vary based on the state you're in. The difference was especially striking when crossing from Arizona to California where anti-choice billboards were swapped for billboards advertising free health care services.

Entering into Joshua Tree National Park was really magical. The park has a very surreal and otherworldly look and feel that makes you feel like you‘re on another planet. Rocks are in massive piles everywhere in a way that looks like humans did it. From afar, the rock looks like smooth buttery sandstone, but upon closer inspection it’s super rough and grainy granite.

Where there aren’t any rocks you’ll find large and striking Joshua Trees, which actually aren’t trees at all, but succulents!

When we arrived at our first campground, there were patches of snow on the ground! Apparently, south-west US has been experiencing pretty abnormal weather for this time of year - rain, snow, and high winds. We met a number of people who had planned to climb in Vegas but came to JTree to escape the rain. This was initially a little disappointing, but the rest of our visit was filled with (fairly) mild temps, and sun with the occasional windy day.

As for the climbing - it was amazing. We got to experiment with some different styles of climbing (like offwidth and chimney climbing, where you have to awkwardly jam your body/ body parts into cracks in the rock) with the most incredible backdrop.

One of my favourite things - the climbing was almost always right next to the parking lot (!), meaning we didn’t have to hike an hour to get there. We loved it so much that I pretty much destroyed my finger skin by climbing a little too much without rest.

I had been craving cake big time, so when we did take a rest day, we bought a cake and shared it! It was the best!

We also got the chance to see some pretty epic desert sunsets!

Next stop, Vegas!

Daniel:

Tucson was a pretty neat town. There are so many huge Saguaro cacti around! We saw some that were about 5 times as tall as we are. The main attraction of Tucson for us was Mt.Lemmon. There is a ton of climbing there that’s good year round. You just have to change what altitude you’re climbing at depending on the season. We drove up to the peak one day and the change was pretty incredible. At the base you have cacti and desert and once you reach the peak there’s snow and the topography made us feel like we were back in Canada.

We ended up climbing at Mt.Lemmon three days. The climbing was quite good and there were some really nice views. For some reason though it wasn’t that inspirational for us. It just didn’t quite feel like a special and unique place. Still very happy we went though and I’d be happy to go back. The climbing over the 3 days was actually pretty productive. It was mostly sport climbing so we were able to push the difficulties a bit more and Emily got lots of good fall practice in.

Once our bodies needed a break and the weather turned a bit sour we headed to Phoenix. Our main reason for stopping there was to check out a pizza place called Bionco Pizzeria. It was featured on an episode of Chef's Table and it was supposed to be some of the best pizza in the world so we had to try it out. We waited in line a little over an hour which wasn’t too bad and it was very much worth it. Probably the best pizza I’ve ever had especially the Margherita.

After lunch we had some time so we went to check out some disc golf courses, Vista Del Camino and Fountain Hills which are both courses that used to be used on the pro tour. They were decent courses but kind of busy being that they are in public parks. Also lots of water hazards. I ended up losing 5 discs over three rounds. :’(

Now at this point in the trip we’ve been moving pretty fast and doing a lot of driving. We’ve just been excited to get to the west coast and the different climbing destinations in California and Utah. Joshua Tree is our first major climbing stop and driving through it to our campsite we were mesmerized. Just piles and piles of massive granite rocks continuously appearing out of nowhere. Every direction we looked there was a lifetime worth of climbing lines. It really was remarkable.

So far we’ve spent 3 great days climbing here and we’ll probably stay for a couple of weeks. Joshua Tree’s difficulty grades are notoriously stout when compared to other climbing areas so we’ve been getting on easy climbs difficulty wise. We’ve still had some spicy and scary (but safe!) moments learning how to climb the J Tree style. We’re looking forward to getting practice climbing chimneys to maybe make a second attempt at climbing a route called Epinephrine in Vegas. Stay tuned!