Getting Hot on the Playa

Ready to experience the desert? My husband was on Sunday, so we headed out to this huge playa about 45 miles from our house. We have plenty of playas closer to our house, but he wanted to go to this particular one because it is a wet playa year round. Not that you can tell by the photo above. In some years it does have water on it, but that water evaporates or seeps down into the soil. Most of the playas near us are wet in the winter and spring and dry out in the summer and have a hard enough surface that you can drive on it. 

Here's the sign next to the playa. It says "WARNING STOP!!! Lake Bed is NOT DRY! Proceeding past this sign will result in getting stuck. $500. minimum recovery fee will be charged to rescue your vehicle. [Bullet hole, bullet hole] Sheriff's Posse"

My husband on the surface is a hard-working rancher. Underneath he is a mad scientist with lots of crazy experiments to try out. His experiments are usually kind of fun, so Desert Boy and I went along for the ride. But when we got out of the truck it was 99 degrees. And once we stepped out onto the playa, with all those sun rays being reflected back to us, it was much hotter.

I trudged along behind, looking at the tracks on the playa. There were some deer and coyote tracks, but mostly there were car tracks--or ruts in some cases. Obviously not everyone heeded the sign's advice.

I found a clear example of this when I came across these boards. Someone had gotten stuck and used the boards to try to get extra traction. Hopefully it worked for them, otherwise they had a big towing bill to pay.

And these three wheel tracks? They were from Desert Boy's stroller. I wonder if anyone else will wander out on the playa and be puzzled by the strange tracks. You can barely make out my husband from here. I had really fallen behind. I don't do so well in hot weather.

Finally I caught up and Desert Boy seemed to be enjoying the view from his stroller. I had enough though, and I wheeled him back to the truck, where we turned on the air conditioner, ate chips, and watched my husband run (run!) from one location to another on the playa. I was praying I wouldn't have to go out and rescue him. If I did, I was hoping that I could load him in the stroller and wheel him back.

Forty-five minutes later my husband came back, beaming as he talked about soil properties and conductance and a bunch of stuff I didn't really understand. I asked him if the heat bothered him. He said no, he just worked up a good sweat and then the wind cooled him off as the sweat evaporated. I told him I could tell he had been sweating a lot due to his odor. He said it wasn't him, it was his clothes! Good golly. You're lucky that they haven't invented share-a-smell over the internet or you know that I'd be sharing the smell with you too. You're probably content with the pictures--the desert is really beautiful, especially when seen from a nice, cool climate.