What It’s Like to Camp at 120 Degrees

I’m haunted by a section of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway, the story of 14 migrants who perished along the U.S.-Mexico border, in which he describes the “schedule of doom”: heat stress, heat fatigue, heat syncope, heat cramps, heat exhaustion, heat stroke, heat death. At one point Urrea writes, “If you’re really lucky, someone might piss in your mouth.” Likewise, I can’t shake a Vanity Fair article by William Langewiesche about global warming and gnarly temps in the Sahara. He chose to travel to the Algerian city of Adrar during a heat wave and delivered a spooky-flat takeaway: “That was a mistake.”

A decade ago, backpacking in the Grand Canyon with my partner Sophia, I glimpsed the beginning of the end. We had hidden in the mists of Thunder Falls through a brutal August afternoon and commenced our climb to the North Rim two hours before sundown. In the middle of the Redwall switchbacks her skin went purple and her arms went limp. The only rejuvenating shade was that cast by my thin frame. She curled in a ball beneath me. We waited for dark.

Sophia suffered a minor form of heat illness and revived. Heat stroke—a rise in body temperature beyond 104 degrees and a subsequent “collapse of basic biophysical functions,” as Langewiesche puts it—is the true nightmare. The science is detailed and complicated, but the gist is that evaporative cooling, or sweating, eventually fails to counter internal heating. Symptoms may include confusion, aggression, slurred speech, rapid breathing, hallucinations, nausea, dizziness, fainting, seizure, and coma. Young, fit, vigorous people can and do succumb. Langewiesche again: “[T]here are no guarantees.”

Sean and I agreed that aiming ourselves at 120 degrees was serious business. This agreement was unspoken, communicated by our methodical, albeit semi-frenzied, preparation. In his sweltering apartment at 6 A.M., we filled a burly plastic jug with seven gallons of water and loaded duffels with three tarps, five maps, and enough hats in enough varieties to start a haberdashery. We fixed sandwiches and a dinner of macaroni and cheese, thereby reducing the need to expend energy in the field. We chugged many consecutive glasses at the kitchen sink. We confirmed that the burly plastic jug wasn’t leaking. We reconfirmed.

The parasol with a PVC stand (butt sawed sharp for jamming into soft ground) was already stowed in Sean’s car from his previous outing. He checked the tires, the full-size spare, the jack, the battery charger, and, neurotically, I checked the burly plastic jug. At half past seven, en route to buy Gatorades, salty snacks, 14 pounds of ice, and a topped-off gas tank, the Hyundai’s dash thermometer read 107. “You can’t assume the vehicle will whisk you to safety,” Sean said. “If it breaks, what next? You’re walking, or hitching, or something. I’d guess most European and even American tourists in a rental overlook that contingency. Calling a tow truck without reception is tough.”

It isn’t just automobiles that cause trouble. On July 2, a private plane had an engine problem and made an emergency landing west of Salsberry Pass on California Highway 178, inside Death Valley National Park. The pilot and passengers were uninjured—rescue personnel promptly arrived, presumably bearing cold beverages —but others have not been so lucky. In the weeks following my trip with Sean, I frequented the park’s newsfeed: a hiker dead, a hiker evacuated by helicopter, a hiker who received third-degree burns on the soles of his feet (sand dunes, flip-flops, agony), a motorist who drove off an embankment and then died of exposure. Unsurprisingly, soaring temperatures in the Grand Canyon have also taken a handful of lives this summer.

The sky was huge and hazy as we traversed the urban sprawl, huge and blue as we exited the Spring Mountains, dropped into Pahrump Valley, and steered toward California. Our target was vague, based on a hasty internet survey of projected highs. (Furnace Creek: 126 degrees.) In addition to heat, we sought solitude, remoteness, and a spread of anonymous dirt where it’d be difficult to believe in the existence of anything besides geology and convection-oven air. Sean mentioned a gleaming white playa—insisted it was the quintessence of blistering, its abiotic austerity unsurpassed—but ultimately we couldn’t resist a 28-mile washboard road in southeastern Death Valley National Park, between the Greenwater Range and the Black Mountains.

At the turnoff, a yellow sign emblazoned with the silhouette of Gopherus agassizii, the threatened desert tortoise, greeted us instead of a ranger’s ticket booth. Was an ancient reptile, for all intents and purposes a 15-million-year-old dinosaur, actually roaming this expanse of creosote scrub, subsisting on beavertail cactus flesh, going about her day ignorant of the weather alerts, the headlines, the untold human tragedies? For a moment, I felt the deep history of capital-H Heat, the scorch of the Mojave that was born at the close of the Pleistocene. We had the windows open. A shiver raced up my spine and bumped into the fat beads of sweat already rolling down.

The sweat kept coming, pouring from my armpits, pooling in my belly button, as we proceeded three miles to a tiny gravel drainage and pulled over at 9:30 A.M. It kept coming as we rigged a tarp system with parachute cord, trekking poles, tent stakes, the car’s roof rack, and hot-to-the-touch rocks scavenged nearby. It kept coming as we paused and listened and heard a lone grasshopper’s brittle clicking. It kept coming as we arranged furniture—ratty camp chairs, rickety table, the cooler serving as an ottoman—to create a surreal man cave.

Chores took less than 45 minutes. We stripped to shorts, sat back, and peered out from our precious, precarious rectangle of shade. The rectangle morphed into a parallelogram. Sean scooched to the right. I scooched to the right. Gatorade the first segued to Gatorade the second. Soon I was coated in the finest grit, a glittering suit of nearly imperceptible particles carried by a nearly imperceptible breeze.

“Impressive that you do this solo,” I said.

Sean wiped his brow. “What?”

“Impressive that…”

“No, do what?”

I nodded at nothing, everything, the dull intensity, the blaring silence, the weird sensation of being hemmed in by an invisible force, a gargantuan power, yet unable to engage it directly for fear of withering. “This,” I repeated. “Do this.”