You Don't Know the Sun!

Posted Sun, March 8, 2009 - 8:50 PM
advracing, travel, utah, primalquest06

Delicate Arch, near Moab, UT

Reflections on Primal Quest '06

It's hard to convey how ridiculously unforgiving summer in the deserts of Utah can be. The skies are crystal clear for days on end, with no relief from clouds. Humidity drops down below 10% and temperatures soar above 100 degrees. The instant the sun peeks up above the horizon, it starts to heat the sand and the slickrock, both good absorbers. It's as if a switch is suddenly turned on, and as the sun rises higher the heat only gets more intense.

By midmorning the red, yellow, and white rocks are radiating heat back at you, so you can't even find relief in the shade of the odd rock outcrop, or solitary juniper. The sand and rocks below you are fiercely radiating back up in your face, even as you try to shelter yourself from the scorching sun. By noon, the sun is only a few degrees from directly overhead, and there are precious few places to hide. The heat saps your strength, your motivation, and your appetite - it becomes hard to eat anything with a sticky, parched mouth, and what you can choke down tastes bland, like cheap saltines. You move slowly and awkwardly, somehow knowing in a primal sort of way that you should only hurry towards another possible shelter. You start to see things in the glare, start to assign an unnatural importance to the shimmerings of hot air rising from the ground. As the air temperature rises above the typical 98.6 of your body temperature, the dryness sucks the water out of you in a way that's almost imperceptible, not slowly, just silently, quick enough to prostrate you in a couple of hours if you don't consciously replace the moisture you lose.

Juniper tree, with shade.

By mid-afternoon the sun has fallen a little, and you can sometimes find places to shelter yourself from the blaze - a canyon wall here, a twisted juniper there - but the ever-present rocks and sand are still charged, flinging out infrared in accordance with the immutable laws of physics. You breathe out onto your hands, and your breath seems too hot to be normal - are you running a fever? As evening comes, the direct sun abates, but the landscape offers no respite, still baking you in a giant convection oven. The intensity of the sun doesn't dissipate until many hours after dark, and for only a short time in the early morning, the desert rapidly becomes cold, forcing you to huddle together and shiver for the warmth so recently in excess, offering a reprieve only until the sun appears once again.

And although the sky stays clear and the nighttime stars are the brightest I've ever seen in my life, the air isn't as clean as you would expect. The constant desert winds whip up a fine mist of microscopic sand that's, nevertheless, clearly visible in the nocturnal beam of a headlamp - ever present, it finds its way into your nose (bloody), your mouth (gritty), your eyes (raw), your ears (gunky), your hair (sandy), your nails (dirty) and your asshole (...) - and a double concern for my female friends.

So what can a human possibly do to protect themselves? We learned quickly, very quickly, as willing participants in Primal Quest Utah in 2006.

1. Water = Life. We carried as much as 6-8 liters at a time, and refilled at every water stop. But our water opportunities were, admittedly, far more generous than many of the early explorers had available to them. Still, we ran out several times and had to trudge through to the next checkpoint before refilling. On the way out of Three Canyon, I relied on a bike bottle full of shitty, salty, iodine-laden water carefully scooped from the trickle that weaved its way across the sandy floor of the canyon.
2. Sun protection. For ten days I wore nothing but a pair of khaki nylon pants and a khaki nylon shirt, both loose fitting and ventilated, with elastic at the wrists and ankles. The material was treated to be SPF 50. Also a brimmed Sahara hat of wicking nylon, with neck protection. The rest of my team had similar outfits.
3. Other people. Getting through the long treks would have been next to impossible had I not been with three other (equally insane) people. We're a very social species; although as individuals we may be relatively solitary in comfortable lives, when conditions become difficult we have a natural propensity to lean on one another.
4. Attitude. This is so important. You have to have thoughts well beyond "how much this sucks right now." Based on what I've posted so far, you won't be surprised that I read through Ed Abbey's Desert Solitaire before arriving in Utah. The brutal and lyrical nature of his prose opened me up to seeing the desert as something more than an adversary - as something ultimately inhuman, but still worthy of exploration and wonder. I credit that mental preparation for why I can actually look back and have good memories of something that was supposed to be "a hell".

More posts on PQ '06 and '08 will be forthcoming.