Search & Rescue was out the morning after the pair had been reported missing.
I heard the helicopter rumbling over my little house up near the national park entrance and figured it was a Marine Corps chopper, because those noisemakers liked to fly low right over my dirt-road neighborhood, going back and forth between Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms. Always practicing for invading some unlucky country in the Middle East. But this one was making circles just inside the park boundary, maybe two miles away. That had happened a couple of times in recent years, when some amateur rock climber had learned about the reality of gravity and had to be flown out on a stretcher. The chopper would set down and take the injured party to the local hospital. Or to a better hospital if the situation was dire.
Making circles meant lost tourists.
It seemed ridiculous — lost tourists in sight of houses and cell phone towers and the highway — but it was the hottest time of year, when the humidity gets sucked up from the Gulf of California, producing a few good thunderstorms and flash floods once in a while. People get confused in the heat.
Out at Amboy Crater, an hour north of Joshua Tree alongside Route 66, there were a couple of deaths every year. People parked their cars and followed the sandy trail through the lava rock and maybe hiked up to the rim of the old volcano and snapped some pictures of each other. And then they became disoriented on the way back, a way back that is much more treacherous in the midday sun. Even in late springtime. There’s no shade. The path that seemed so clear on the way in becomes confusing. Soft bodies and weak hearts don’t know how to respond, so they overreact, overheat. With pounding pulses and sweaty faces, the frightened tourists become distraught. Which look-alike sandy path between look-alike piles of black lava rock leads to the rental sedan with the air-conditioning? So many day hikers have died at Amboy Crater that the federal Bureau of Land Management had to put up some big colorful flags to show people the way back to the parking lot.
Just as I was making coffee, I got a call from the little radio station where I work. Nighttime, mostly, although I fill in a daytime shift when necessary. But nighttime is the good time, just me and the airwaves and whatever souls might be listening. Community radio is a different animal than the sounda-like FM and AM corporate channels still around at this point in the fractured media environment.
It was Gary, the news editor. “You see the Search & Rescue over there?”
I did. Would I maybe go over and check it out? I said I would. Not my regular duty but I’d done enough of it. Enough to know I preferred the late shift, taking calls from Landers and Sunfair and Yucca Mesa and Pipes Canyon and the base, wherever people listened. Lots of calls about UFOs and meth shacks. Desert stuff. I played a little music between the calls. If you’ve got a community radio station in your town, you know what I’m talking about.
Professionally equipped with my one necktie and a travel mug, I got in the truck and drove down Quail Springs to the ticket booth of the park’s entrance. Marla was in there, scowling out at the world. I nodded hello and showed my annual pass.
“They’re at the Loop Trail parking lot,” she offered. “Couple of kids.”
“Little kids?”
“Young people.” She rolled her eyes. I said thanks and drove off before she could get started on the superintendent, or the RVs, or how many months until she could get full retirement. They must’ve put her in the booth to discourage people from visiting at all.
It was weeks before Labor Day, so the road was mostly empty. I hardly ever drove into the national park. The road was really just a loop that came out at Twentynine Palms, although you could keep going south and eventually come out at the 10, in the low desert. From October to June it was mostly a traffic jam. The people in my rural neighborhood just walked in, when they bothered at all. I loved the park best as my backyard view. It stopped Palm Springs from crawling up the hill, stopped the Inland Empire from spilling all the way up from the San Gorgonio Pass. And it was still full of mountain lions and coyotes and bobcats.
Joshua Tree National Park was mostly lacking in the Joshua tree department. The southern half of the park had none, in fact. Back when it became a national monument — thanks to a well-connected desert-loving Pasadena socialite named Minerva Hamilton Hoyt — it was going to be called “Desert Plants National Monument.” Accurate, if not very poetic. Instead, FDR’s Department of the Interior named it after the yucca brevifolia, or what the Mormon pioneers called the Joshua tree. Imagine having religion so alive in your head that even a raggedy-ass yucca tree full of spikes and spiders reminds you of a biblical hero.
There are a lot more Joshua trees in Mojave National Preserve, another several hours’ drive to the northeast, but it’s too far from Silver Lake and Echo Park to get much visitation. Which makes it my favorite. But there’s no work out there. No radio stations. No listeners. Just a lot of wild and beautiful Mojave Desert.
When I came around the bend, the helicopter was landing in the trailhead parking lot and an NPS cop was standing in the road. There was no place to pull over; so many dimwits had driven off the pavement and into the raw desert that the park service had to build curbs along the whole way. It was like the old Autopia ride in Disneyland. So, I waited until the yellow rescue chopper had lifted off again and the Smokey Bear let me through, although he wasn’t happy about letting me turn into the parking lot.
“Trail’s closed.” He was new. Not young, but new. I fished around the glove compartment for my expired KCDZ press pass and he relented.
A burly retired marine named Miguel was the Search & Rescue captain. He was yelling into a walkie-talkie and pointing at various volunteers with his free hand. They were all volunteers. They all looked like hell.
“The dogs gave out,” he said. The scent-hound handlers were loading a couple of overweight old dogs into a van. “They couldn’t make it back.”
It was just an easy loop, maybe three miles total. But boy was it hot, and sticky. I loosened my tie and wiped the sweat off my sunglasses.
“I just need some basics to bring to the station,” I said. He didn’t have much, but it was enough. I wrote down the names and the ages and then I noticed a cream-colored Acura parked by the pit toilets.
“That’s their car,” Miguel said. “The dude’s car. You can’t touch it.”
“I don’t want to touch it,” I said. “Just show me the registration. Or anything else that’s interesting.”
He shook his head and went back to the dogs and the handlers. What a sorry crew. I took a phone picture of the sedan’s license plate and got back in my truck.
Of course I wound up driving to the station in Joshua Tree and typing up the story and recording it for the afternoon news because the morning crew was already home for the day. By the time I’d finished all this unintended work, it was only a couple of hours until my night show. So I went over to the saloon and had a bad early dinner and sweated some more, because Girard refuses to put in air-conditioning and the swamp coolers don’t work this time of year.
The press loves a missing-hiker story. And our missing Joshua Tree tourists got the full treatment. From a distance, I mean. It’s the kind of police-beat story you throw together in the newsroom back in Los Angeles, mostly taken from our station’s website, with some new bits from the sheriff’s department press release and the usual heartfelt statements from the families.