Climbing adventures in Newark Ohio and Joshua Tree

Michael Lapina and Ray Lamp's Legendary Adventures

It has been a long time since I made any changes to my personal website. I have devoted much time to the treasure hunting site. I wanted to again begin to document some of my adventures on the internet for all to see and enjoy.

This adventure is my second trip to Joshua Tree National Park. It was the Tenth anniversary of the Monument changing status and gaining the extra protection of having the title “Park” in its name. My visit occurred in mid-November, just after the last of the festivities.

I was visiting one of my three best friends. Ray Lamp lives in Joshua Tree (the town) just outside of the park. The only disadvantage of him living here is that he is so far away from where I live. Thus we rarely get to see each other any more. The great advantage is that he lives next to the park and we can have great fun inside the park doing many of the activities we enjoyed while growing up in Newark, Ohio.

We always enjoyed hiking. We hiked up & down the Raccoon Creek, The Licking River, Rocky Fork, private property and farms in Gratiot, Ohio and later we hiked for miles thru the woods and down the Haul Roads of Ohio Power Recreation Land in South Eastern Ohio.

Hiking in the Monument is incredible. You often can see for miles. Great piles of rocks appear seemingly at random over the vast flats of the desert. Wildlife hides in the sparse and uniquely fashioned vegetation. We saw coyotes, lizards, rabbits, ground squirrels and tree squirrels, song birds, California Quails, dung beetles and we saw tarantulas during my first visit in 2003. We didn’t see a lot of fish which was often the inspiration for our hikes in Ohio.

Back in Ohio, Ray and I were always up for exploration. Since no one was ever hurt, I guess it can’t hurt to mention some of the things we climbed in our youth. During a snow day when the school was canceled due to the extreme low temperatures, we attempted to climb the water tower at the Roper buildings. We defeated the fence, and hid out of site in a shack that housed a big fire hydrant next to the tower. I took the rope I had bought at the flea market and we managed to toss it over the bottom rung of the tower ladder. It was cut off at a height to prevent stupid kids from climbing it. We, of course, were not stupid and that is why we had the rope. We climbed the rope and began our journey upward. Ray was in the lead as I recall. It was bitter cold and the wind was blowing hard. I was worried as I looked up, because the ladder seemed to lean out at the last several feet to the top at the access point to the causeway around the tower’s tank. When I tell this story I like to say we made it half way up, but I think it was probably just over quarter of the way. We had messed in the snow the day before and Ray’s gloves had gotten wet. As we climbed, the wind and cold metal froze his gloves into a stiffened position. He no longer had full used of his hands. Conditions being less that ideal, we decided to go back down. I hadn’t thought of it before, but perhaps Ray was also nervous about the perilous access to the causeway at the top. Ice wind and cold temperatures defeated us that day.

As you can see our adventures in the desert were not unlike those we experienced in Ohio.

Other days were more successful. We scaled the walls to an old railroad station and entered it from the top floor. The insides were a mess and we thoroughly explored the building. (Memory fails who was on this trip? Was Ray, Matt and Frank all there?) Ray scaled the wall to the balcony at Roosevelt Jr. High. We both climbed McGuffy, We explored the old slaughter house, and descended into a sewer system or two. We climbed tall trees and grape vines up into the canopy. We climbed on top of all the old roper buildings and explored the old passenger rail cars that were stored nearby. We climbed the railroad trestles, sandy cliffs on the Licking River (this sound simple, but it was steep loose and scary) and cliffs at Ohio Power.

It is no wonder that the Joshua Tree National Park is so fun with an infinite supply of boulders piled in infinite combinations. This makes for unlimited climbing adventures to any degree of difficulty desired. Some of the photos with great views are a result of scaling such magnificent rocks. Who would have thought that God would care so much to provide such a playground for adults? He did and Ray and I both appreciate his wisdom and his handiwork! Had we such a place in Ohio, we probably never would have had to climb all those rickety manmade buildings.

Please enjoy these other pictures of Joshua Tree National Park. You should be able to click on the photo to get the full sized image.

Twenty Nine Palms Mural

Barker Dam Lake

View from Palm Springs Airport, CA

Mom & Dad at Raccoon Creek; Newark, Ohio