Epic Travel → North America → The West Coast → Southern California → South Central Desert → Joshua Tree → ⊗ Rattlesnake Canyon

⊗ Technical Route ⊗Warning: Do Not Attempt Without Proper Training – click here for details

Location: Indian Cove area, Joshua Tree

Time Required: 2 – 3 hours

Distance: 0.8 miles (0.1 miles technical)

Elevation Gain/Loss: 115 feet

Rappels: 2, lengths up to 60 feet

Red Tape/Notes: Entrance fee is $25 per vehicle and the park is open 24 hours. For more information on the park, including available hikes, visit the Joshua Tree NPS website. For additional beta on the route, including a gpx file and recent trip reports, visit ropewiki.

What’s Nearby?: Willow Hole, Wonderland of Rocks Traverse

This is a great little canyon to add some variety to a JTree climbing or hiking trip, and is a really great intro for canyon newbies. It’ll only take you two or three hours to complete, including training/practice if you have a first-timer, but with its smooth, sculpted walls and pools of water, it’s like entering another world compared to the desert landscape outside. The potholes will get you wet, and would probably be quite manky by summer (although I’m not sure you want to be out here in the summer anyway), but they’re quite pleasant in the spring. The route seems to have originally been done as three or four rappels, but it’s easy to just do as two longer rappels. Creative anchor building is required in this canyon, since there are no trees or boulders. A chockstone has traditionally been used as the first anchor point, and for the past several years a knot chock has been used to create the second anchor, placed into a nice crack DCR. Extend the second rappel to the deeper, long pothole; from the exit of this pothole, you can see that the remainder of the canyon descent is a cascade of small drops and potholes that can easily be down climbed.

Epic Travel → North America → The West Coast → Southern California → South Central Desert → Joshua Tree → ⊗ Rattlesnake Canyon