This Is What It's Like to Camp in One of the Hottest Places on Earth

Let me acknowledge, right up front, that in this ghastly era of anthropogenic global warming I combusted a whole bunch of fossil fuel in order to descend from the cool green sanctuary of the Colorado Rockies, where I’m blessed to reside, and cross the hot, dry, fiercely sunburned interior West. My destination was the kiln of the Mojave Desert and, sequestered within that immensity of thirst, a line on the thermometer: 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Or perhaps worse. It depended on where my best friend Sean suggested we camp.

Was this a vacation? A gross display of privilege? According to the CDC, extreme heat waves cause approximately 1,220 deaths in the U.S. annually. Granted, I do not belong to the especially endangered demographic groups: infant, senior, unhoused, impoverished, employed outdoors. The list is tragic and long. But trust me, the trip wasn’t idle amusement. I felt compelled to make raw somatic contact with our new and thoroughly dismaying climate regime, to face the faceless temperatures of the 21st century.

Sean is a social-studies teacher in Las Vegas who spends much of his summer break driving random dirt roads, exploring the desiccated, dust-choked hinterlands of Nevada and California. His style is the opposite of athletic, unless geography paired with existential contemplation constitutes a sport. He pokes around, parks the Hyundai, plants a parasol, eats and drinks, hikes a mile or three at dusk, counts shooting stars, sleeps, moves on. The very emptiness and quiet are his activity, the elemental place—overwhelming in a dozen different ways—his passion.

Chatting on the phone in early July, he informed me that the mercury in his apartment in North Vegas was registering 120 degrees, a record for the city. “A/C shut off yesterday,” he said. “Kicked back on this morning. The grid…a surge…my unit…I dunno. In any case, I’m heading out for 24 hours.” Air temps at Furnace Creek, in Death Valley National Park, were approaching the world’s highest reliable measurement of 130 degrees, made there in 2021. “I bet it’ll only be teens in the Mojave Preserve,” he continued. “And single digits or lower at night.”

This omission of the “hundred” prior to “teens” and “single digits” reminded me of how folks at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, where I once worked, eschew the phrase “below zero” because, quite simply, “above zero” doesn’t occur in that part of Antarctica. I’d confronted (negative) 80 degrees during my stint on The Ice and handled it pretty well. In fact, I’d relished the challenge of strenuous labor, the steady, drudging effort that pumps blood to fingers and toes, lungs and brain. Our apocalyptic present is another matter. Strenuous labor is potentially lethal and the steady, drudging effort is that of patience: hunkering in the shade, trying your damnedest not to budge.

Sean isn’t exactly a fan of the heat, but he accepts its authority, and this allows him to briefly sneak outside even when doing so is deemed reckless, or at least exceedingly unpleasant. We decided I should visit him ASAP to join one of his 24-hour excursions into the reality that almost nobody is eager to embrace—call it our current and future home.

I wrote an email to my parents in Vermont after hanging up the phone, explaining the plan, tacking on a paragraph about anxiety and electrolytes. My dad replied: “Do be careful as we bubble at 108 degrees.” I was unfamiliar with the verb “to bubble” in the context of human physiology, but caught his drift. My mom, whose hairdresser claims I am responsible for the grays she is paid to dye blond, cut to the chase with her usual no-nonsense wisdom: “You’ve never experienced that kind of heat. I don’t think we are meant to experience that kind of heat. I’ll just say this—show it the utmost respect.”

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.”

Scribbles from my notebook…

10:45. At the South Pole, you’re tethered to the station, the diesel generators and chocolate chip cookies, the imported warmth. Here, it’s tarps and drinks, the microhabitat we’ve established. As a species, we survive by modification of environment and plasticity of behavior, period.

11:20. Head hurts. Hydration is impossible, hydration is mandatory. Square that circle. A quart an hour minimum? More? Diarrhea is a frightening prospect. You could literally shit yourself to death in the Mojave due to cheap tacos. Probably happens quick.

Noon. Gotta pee. Went shirtless and barefoot earlier and the result was a desperate sprint for cover. I’m dressed appropriately this time, popped collar, sneakers, etc. Off I go.

12:15. Pee was neither transparent nor sickeningly chartreuse. I’ll consider that a win. Metaphors proliferate out there. A vice clamping the ribcage. A pizza stone pressed to the temple. A rough, sun-administered frisking. A claustrophobic hug from Satan—or maybe God.

1:10. Dumped half a cup of water into the gravel six inches from my seat. I’m also monitoring the apple Sean set on the table. Will it turn to fruit leather?

1:35. Officially gone. Damp patch? What damp patch? If half a cup of water spills in the desert but no one…

2:50. We’ve been discussing the question of who leads in the dance. In this instance, definitely the heat. That’s tricky for the typical modern American. Usually, we’re active agents, calling the shots: I want to accomplish such-and-such task. I want to recreate in such-and-such fashion. See that hill? I’m gonna jog it! Right now! Giddyup! Our will to push, to persevere, to achieve, is undeniably badass—we’re talented in that regard—and therein lies the problem. Overconfidence. Better at giving commands than taking them.

4:40. Two minutes ago, reading a field guide aloud, the word “bush” came out as buh-sh, like saying “bus” with a lisp. WTF? How do you pronounce it? I studied the page for a solid 30 seconds, stymied. Tried boosh and immediately knew it was wrong, which was reassuring. I’m fuzzy, sloppy. Decent enough, but far from normal.

5:05. Screw journaling. Language is too heavy a lift. Ditto this pencil in my mind (meant to write “hand”). And it’s sizzling, the pencil. Same for the notebook, the legs of the chair, the car’s fender and hubcaps, the Gatorade in my bottle, every surface everywhere. Sizzling. Screw it.

5:50. OK, finally ready for a little hike.

We meandered east, up a gentle grade: lizard tracks but zero lizards, parched soil crumbling underfoot. Initially, our hovel appeared as a curious anomaly, an arbitrary scuff on the clean sweep of the valley floor—then it shrank to an insignificant speck. Though the sun remained intimidating, a fist and a half above the horizon, the worst was over.

Moving through that desolate scenery—the craggy browns of the Black Mountains, the lumpy browns of the Greenwater Range, the innumerable beiges and ochres and umbers sloping away, away, away—I realized what had rendered writing preposterous. It wasn’t merely heat. It was heat plus the dopey, slack-jawed vigil, eight straight hours scoured of the usual excitements and diversions: laptop, phone, music, bird singing from a tree, jet rumbling in the clouds, a toilet to flush, a doorknob to twist, an allegiance to something other than passivity. Heat may have sapped the energy required for meaning-making, but staring at the bleak, beautiful, radically non-linguistic landscape for seemingly longer than forever had sapped the desire. Thoughts, sentences? They diffused into the vastness. 

Step by sluggish step, the change of pace and perspective returned us to language. At the base of a rubble-strewn ridge, we plopped down, gulped water, and riffed on the idea of heat as wilderness, a wide and rugged terrain that can’t easily be escaped once entered, that leaves you small, cautious, humble—and if it doesn’t, you pay the price. This idea led us to awe, that mix of terror and wonder often associated with nature’s monolithic indifference and incomprehensibility. Obviously, it’s unconscionable to celebrate the killer temps of the new climate. This weather murders soldiers in body armor, laborers in farm fields, panhandlers on the street, grandma and grandpa, the helpless, the trapped, whoever. So we didn’t celebrate it. We simply recognized it as staggering, category-shattering, a phenomenon that deserves (thanks, Mom) the utmost respect.

Around 10 P.M.—after stumbling back to the Hyundai, chowing hard on mac and cheese, grinning because we spied a bat, a fellow mammal, flitting against the orange sunset glow—I wished Sean a nice uncomfortable rest and wandered off to inflate my pad among the bushes. (Bushes, of course, pronounced like Busch Light, like George Bush, duh.) Lying there in my boxers with a cooler-dunked bandana pasted to my stomach, I watched the constellations spin. I’ve camped in the desert without a tent and I’ve camped in the desert without a mummy bag, but rarely have I camped in the desert without either, without the physical and psychological mediation they provide. The feeling was one of total vulnerability. Simultaneously, there was a quality of intimacy.

Technically, the day never ends and the sun never quits raining its life-generating, life-obliterating fire. Technically, what we call night, relief, is just the planet’s prodigious shadow, a fleeting gift of shade, a very thick screen temporarily buffering the heat. The earth, I thought, in the drowsy-dazed manner of a guy teetering at the cusp of dreams—the earth is a tarp.

With that I fell asleep. Sort of. The bandana became a useless crust. The temperature dropped, but not by much, maybe high nineties in the run-up to dawn. Red ants bit my calves. Red ants bit my triceps. And a pain throbbed in my chest, an ache for tomorrow, when my best friend and I would hop in the air-conditioned car and the desert, framed by both the rearview mirror and the windshield, would continue to burn.

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