Backroads: Too Cold to Change a Flat, and other Considerations

Upon getting out of the truck at the north end of the Monitor Valley playa, it became rapidly clear to me that it was very cold. (Later, the weather calendar for Eureka showed a max of 28°F and a min of-3°F for the day.) When I pulled off to the side of the road, possibly running over some spiky twigs from the roadside saltbushes, I hoped I wouldn't get a flat tire. I then immediately reassured myself that my fairly new tires still had good tread, and that *of course* I wouldn't get a flat.

By the time we got back to the truck after our excursion a relatively short distance out onto the playa, my fingers were freezing and my face was icy. I once again considered the chances of getting a flat from running over thorny bushes, so instead of turning around in the middle of the road, I drove a short way to a wider turnaround spot. I decided then that I wouldn't change a tire if one happened to go flat: it was just too damned cold. Instead, I figured I would immediately get into the back of the truck and climb into one of our -20°F sleeping bags. (Well, maybe I would have run the heater to warm my hands up first, but I wouldn't have wanted to use much gas. MOH, however, says we wouldn't have had a problem changing a flat, so maybe he wasn't as chilled!)

After getting back on the Monitor Valley Road, we proceeded north past Diana's Punchbowl, a travertine hill with inset bowl or depression containing hot water that will presumably boil any living thing that falls into it (reported temperatures range from 138°F to 200°F), and drove on to Potts Ranch Hot Springs, where we ultimately decided that the water was too cool for the outdoor temperature that I guessed was possibly as low as 5 or 10°F — or maybe it was 15°F with a wind of 7 mph, or 20°F with a wind of 10 mph. The average wind at the Eureka Airport was 7.4 mph that day, with gusts from the northwest, though we remember a breeze from the south.
At some point, either at the hot springs, or more likely as we were heading up the road past The Geographic Center of Nevada, we had a brief discussion about the cold and what we would do if the truck broke down on this relatively desolated, but mostly good, graveled road.

What would we do if the truck broke down out here? Would we walk to the nearest occupied ranch? Well, no, we'd stay with the truck and probably get in our sleeping bags, which were in the back inside the metal Caravan camper.

We had some food (and coffee), along with a Coleman stove for heating some of the water we had brought with us — water we had carefully preserved from freezing by placing in a large ice box. Although our food was really meant for two days and the second day was getting on toward dusk, we could stay with the truck awhile before getting too hungry or thirsty. The nearest active ranch that I knew of, the Monitor Valley ranch, was about 7 miles from Potts Ranch Hot Springs, about 11 miles SSW of the sign for the geographic center, and maybe about 14 or 15 miles back from the place where we started this conversation. Highway 50, at this point, was "only" 11 or 12 miles to the northeast. We had just passed a sign that said a ranch was off to the east up some side road, but I had no idea how far up the road the ranch might be, or whether the ranch was active.

So, had we broken down during the late afternoon or dusk of early evening, we would have stayed with the truck. We could try to spot ranch lights by dark, giving us a better idea of what we might to do by the light of the next day.

Would we activate one of our SPOTs to send a 911 message? Well, probably not right away.

I suspect that the Monitor Valley Road is fairly well traveled ordinarily, although I haven't been on it routinely for many, many years. I would expect at least one or two ranchers or other travelers to come by per day, even in the dead of winter. We would have, therefore, stayed in the truck hoping for someone to come by the next day instead of sending a SPOT 911 call right away and incurring possible search-and-rescue charges. Because we had really only packed food for two days, we might have been getting low on food by the end of the second, unless I still happened to have a stash of old canned food somewhere in the back of the truck, which I doubted.

If no one had come down the road by noon to mid-afternoon of the next day, we would have faced the same choice: walk, stay another night with our dwindling food and adequate water, or SPOT a 911 call. (There was no cell service, as far as I know.) I suspect that we might have stayed another night and then walked or sent a SPOT call for help on the third day, but we didn't end up having to make that choice.
I had been thinking about some of these possibilities since stopping at the north end of the Monitor Valley playa. There, we could have considered walking to the far side of Diana's Punchbowl, where warm or hot water flows in a creek coming from the eastern base of the spring mound. Reasons not to walk? I didn’t know the temperature of the water, our trek would have taken us farther off the main road than we already were, and we would have been going away from the shelter of the truck. (One can always burn tires for heat.) I suppose we could have carried food and some water along with our sleeping bags, but in my mind, no tent means no real shelter, and we didn’t have a tent to carry with us. Additionally, the warmth factor of the water, which I remembered as warm but not hot, was in question. (It turns out that the water was probably warm enough at about 110 to 120°F.) All in all, we would have faced similar circumstances and made similar choices as we might have made farther to the north: we were about 0.5 miles from the main road, about 4 miles from Diana's Punchbowl, and about 9 or 10 miles from the active Monitor Valley ranch.
Had we broken down at Potts Hot Springs, we would have stayed overnight, maybe getting warm in the springs before retiring to our sleeping bags (and maybe not, since the water was only around 100°F), leaving us to face the same choices the next day. Potts, however, is closer to the active Monitor Valley ranch — it's about 7 miles away — making it fairly likely that we would have walked the next day. Seven miles is still a fairly long hike over the repetitive ups and downs of the main road, which crosses alluvial fans coming off the east side of the Toquima Range, but 7 miles is feasible. We would have still been taking a chance by walking away from the shelter of the truck; but in this case, the truck was on a side road and probably not visible to the rest of the world, and we would have been walking down a main road, visible to anyone that might happen by.

An active ranch doesn’t necessarily have people present, but if no one is home, one can presumably break in if needed, make a phone call (if there is phone service), wait for people to come, or send a 911 call via SPOT while one waits indoors.

After all this consideration during the course of two hours or less, I realized that I really haven't done much field work out in the middle of nowhere in very low temperatures during the middle of winter. Also, when I did that sort of thing at all, other field partners were likely to have been waiting back at the motel, ready to go out looking if necessary. For this wintry trip, we had blithely traversed at least 90 miles of dirt roads by the time we had reached the geographic center of Nevada, and I hadn’t given the temperatures and our relative isolation a second thought until late afternoon: those roads and that area had become familiar to me over the years, although most of my familiarity dates back 20 to more than 30 years ago.

I think I'll at least take more food with me the next time I go out into the chilling cold.

Left Behind: Pink Point

It's rare that I haven't brought too much back from the field, rather than too little, so I had to think hard about the question for this month's Accretionary Wedge:

What do you regret leaving behind at a geological locality?

and I'm not sure that what and where I left this one thing qualifies as terribly geological.

One day, while in the middle of our 1978 helicopter camp in Hot Creek Canyon (camp #3, not yet blogged), I was let off by the helicopter in the early morning on the top of a drainage — a fairly typical thing for days when the helicopter was in camp. That particular morning, there was no good place near the top of the drainage to be let out, and so the pilot put one skid on a rock outcrop jutting 10 or 20 feet up in the air, a rocky mass all surrounded by dense juniper and piñon. He told me to hop out on the downhill side. (We hadn't really gotten any hover-exit training the way Indiana Meg did; our pilot seemingly expected us to know everything he learned over his many years in Vietnam and Alaska.)

I looked, and sure enough it was somehow possible; after I threw my pack into the brush below me, I managed to get myself onto the skid. Maybe it was only 5 feet down, but it was the hairiest "landing" save one other that I can recall.

The rest of the day was somewhat standard save for three things.

(1) I found a large pink projectile point in the middle of the drainage I was walking down, a drainage that had obviously seen some flooding in the last 1 to 5 years. The point was possibly made of Ivanhoe "chert" (more precisely opalite or silicified tuff) from the Tosawihi Quarries of northern Nevada, a large series of rock quarries made by ancient to nearly present-day native Americans in the Ivanhoe mercury-gold district north of Battle Mountain. I had been trained by my archaeological contacts to leave things like this in place, but I debated a long time before complying and moving downstream. GPS didn't exist back then, so I carefully spotted the location on my 7.5' topo map, planning to report the location later to the NAS or BLM. The problem with this approach is that the point was an anomaly: it was probably washed downstream in the most recent flash flood and would probably end up being buried by the next. I should have picked it up, marked the location on the map, and turned it in to a museum or some other appropriate outfit.

That's the thing I regret leaving in the field.

(2) A second fairly unusual thing happened that day when I nearly stepped on a rattlesnake. It was by no means the first rattler I'd seen that summer, but it was the closest I had come to one without being warned. I was walking rather quickly downhill through some trees, having bypassed part of the drainage because of dense vegetation. I stepped, and in mid-step I saw the rattlesnake just as it saw me. I sidled rapidly to the right while it slithered rapidly to the left. It had absolutely no interest in making a stand, which is what I've found to be the case in most of my rattlesnake encounters. Needless to say my adrenalin shot up.

(3) Later that day, after having walked and sampled the entire drainage down to the range front, I picked out a likely helicopter landing spot on the upper part of the alluvial fan. The sun was hot. The willows, or some other large, clumpy masses of sticks with minimal leaves, were not casting any shadows worth using, and trees were lacking. I took my flannel shirt (worn in early morning when the temperatures were sometimes chilly) out of my backpack, placed it half over a sagebrush and half over my head and face, and lay down under the shade I had just created.

I think that the only reason I recall the last bit is because of the three earlier unusual events and because it was possibly the first time I created shade in the desert that way. The trunk of a juniper tree would have been most welcome.

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For the record, I also regret leaving behind one or two boxes of jasperoid from my thesis area in the yard or shed of a house I moved away from in 1979 or 1980. As far as I know, samples of that jasperoid no longer exist, certainly there are no more outcrops of it.

Related Posts:
A Few Rules of the Desert
The Caliente Series & Caliente Camp Series

Monsoonish Weather While Mapping

Nice view of The Field, with rain just about to happen.

Rain happens, and messes with my windshield.

Rain. Around here it's called the monsoon. It comes up from the south, from Arizona way, moves into eastern Nevada and western Utah, hangs around for a while - or even all summer long.

Mosquitoes. Forgot to mention them in my Rules of the Desert. Take precautions if necessary. Drink some gin and tonics (at night, I'd say), to help keep the malaria away and to prevent any incipient onset of scurvy that might arise (well, for that, you've got to stick a lime in it!). Gin, made from juniper berries, is supposed to be good for all kinds of things (well, the berries are), but in a gin & tonic, it's supposed to be the best drink for counteracting the effects of heat, as Rod Smith of the Los Angeles Times has said:

"No other drink counters oppressive heat better than a gin and tonic. The Gatorade of British colonial days, it was what allowed Englishmen to join mad dogs out in the noonday sun."

.Outback Lemming, take note!

A Few Rules of the Desert

I've been meaning to publish this one for awhile, but now's the time - it's summer, people are in the field or will be soon, and Tuff Cookie , MJC Rocks, and Hypocentre have both posted some good lists of things they have learned and things that can go wrong while in the field. Some of the rules below will apply to non-desert-type field areas. Use some judgement.

1) Always walk in the shade if possible, even if that means tracking back and forth a little - and try to have your head in the shade in which you are walking.

2) Likewise, always sit in the shade if possible, even if that means scrunching yourself under a small cliff. Have as much of your body in the shade as possible.

3) You can create shade by placing a shirt over a bush and putting your head underneath the shirt. If you are sitting around waiting for someone to pick you up in the desert (like a helicopter or field partner), that small amount of shade is better than nothing.

4) In a similar vein, always wear a hat, a light-colored one is best. The hat will keep the sun off the top of your head, which will help keep you cool, cooler at least than without a hat. A baseball hat will keep the sun out of your eyes. A hat with a brim all the way around will keep the sun off your neck and ears, helping with possible sunburn problems.

5) Unless you really like a tan and are not very fair skinned, always wear sunscreen. I prefer sunscreen with a SPF of 30 to 50. SPF-15 sunscreen does almost nothing for me if I'm out all day long. (And even if you "like a tan," consider wearing sunscreen, anyway.)

6) When you come to a mine adit (or other dark, cool, or enclosed area), always throw a rock in before getting too close or going in. Rattlesnakes like to hide out and stay cool in mine adits. And, as I've mentioned before, so do other wild animals like mountain lions.

7) Mine adits are great places to find shade. They are usually cooler than the heat of the mid-day desert sun, being at average, year-round ground temperature (that would be warmer than the outside air in the winter).

8) If you go into said mine adits, make sure with a light or the reflected light from your Brunton compass mirror that there aren't any shafts just inside the entrance. A shaft is a hole in the ground, into which you don't want to fall. If you have not had any training in underground workings and aren't with at least one other person (preferably two others), DO NOT GO IN AT ALL. Stay out, stay alive. (Going in old workings and active underground mines has a whole other set of rules - one rule is: two lights per person is minimum, and one light per person had better be a fully charged, REAL mine lamp, not a flashlight.)

9) If you have to walk out (from getting stuck or stranded in the desert), do so at night if at all possible. In fact, only walk out in daytime if you know exactly where you are going, what road or building or spring you are planning to get to, how long it will take to get there, and when you can expect a person to be coming along. Also, consider all of those things if you are walking out at night, while also considering how well and how safely you can traverse the ground in the dark.

10) Because deserts (and other countryside - anywhere) can also be cold, especially at night, and even in high summer - always carry waterproof matches.

11) Always know the countryside. Know where all the springs are, and know which ones have water this year. Know if any dry washes are likely to have water running in them. Know which so-called perennial streams or creeks might actually be dry.

12) In other words, always have a good topographic map with you. A GPS with a good, downloaded map might suffice, but batteries can die, and sometimes the satellites are unreachable (bottoms of some canyons) or their output might for some reason be inaccurate. A folded paper map will never run out of batteries and will never give you the wrong coordinates (unless you read it incorrectly).

13) If you are stuck or stranded and have a vehicle, stay with it. There are only a very few occasions when leaving your vehicle to walk out is a good idea. Of course, you will have to make that decision in the field, hopefully not after you've become muddle-headed from lack of water, from heatstroke or heat exhaustion, or from exposure to the cold.

14) Always have plenty of water. If you have a vehicle, have it loaded with water. Five gallons in a vehicle is an absolute minimum, even when traveling on paved roads. In fact, when on any dirt road, the USFS and BLM generally require you to have one axe, one shovel, and one gallon of water per vehicle. (And they may still be able to draft you for fire fighting, maybe.)

15) If you are out and about in the middle of nowhere (or maybe even somewhere), and you see a water trough or water tank - get in it. A great way to cool off. As mentioned in the comments, it's probably a good idea to check for snakes first, especially in some areas, though I've never seen any in cattle troughs or tanks in the western and southwestern U.S. deserts (also, see note below about other areas).

16) Remember, almost any water (for drinking) will do in a real pinch, although particular water sources are best left for absolute last resorts. Carry some water purification pills (for the water, not you), and have a water purification system in your truck. As Chuck notes below, NEVER drink radiator water that has antifreeze in it, which is most radiator water - that will kill you.

17) Don't ever, ever throw any water away, and use the absolute minimum necessary for things like washing dishes and hands, or brushing teeth. Absolute minimum. Absolute.

18) Don't drink beer while working in the desert (especially a hot desert, especially while camping out with possibly limited resources and a long walk out if your truck goes bad). Beer (etc.) is dehydrating. And don't whine (to me) about this rule. If you break this rule, go back to the rule about carrying lots of water, and triple the amount of water you need to carry in your truck.

19) If you are traveling about off-road in a vehicle, always have two spare tires. Head in as soon as the first one becomes flat. Don't wait for the second one to become flat! Carry some of that awful tire goo. Know how to change a tire, and have everything possible that you might need to use: cheater bar, WD40, handyman jack in case you are in a tight spot (do not use on rental car), and flares or orange triangles in case you are on the side of a major road. Have a tire pump in your truck - one that plugs into your cigarette lighter or attaches to your battery - in case you only have a relatively slow leak and don't want to use the awful tire goo.

20) Have any and all means necessary and possible for getting said vehicle unstuck. Always carry a full roll of duct tape.

21) Have a partner with you if at all possible, or at least be within walking distance of where people are or pass through routinely - routinely being at least 4 times per day. If you know or suspect that people - like ranchers, cowboys, sheepherders, or other geologists - pass through the area less than 4 times per day, then count that as zero people.

22) In other words, know the countryside you are working in and all the conditions.

23) Even before you become stranded, have a plan of what you are going to do, if. Where are you going to go? What will you do when you get there? Will there be someone there, or will someone come by in a vehicle? How long will you wait where you are after the helicopter pilot (or your field partner in a truck) hasn't come to pick you up?

24) If you find yourself walking in circles while mapping, or if you find yourself not being able to decide which way to go next or what to do next - it is time to stop, whatever you are doing. Sit down. Sit down in the shade! Do not sit down on a hot outcrop. Drink some water. If you have an ice chest with cold water from melting ice, put some on a scarf or hat or shirt, and put that on your head to cool yourself off. Maybe you are just walking in circles because it's late in the day and it's time to call it quits. Maybe you are walking in circles because you are in the very early stages of heat stroke or heat exhaustion. If you are young and sure of your condition, consider pouring some of the melted ice water over your head - that is a very fast way to cool off -- Disclaimer: this method may not be recommended by safety personnel because of potential shock or heart considerations.

25) Always carry a first-aid kit, even if only a small one. These days, a cell phone could be helpful, if you are in range. A satellite phone might be even better.

26) Always know the latest rules about what to do in case of a snakebite (the first-aid people change their minds about this one fairly often).

27) More about water - if you stop sweating, drink some water. Drink lots of water. Don't stop drinking water. Go into town and get a motel room with air conditioning. Your body will hardly cool you if the temperature is over 120 degrees F. Get on in to town!

28) Of course, some things might happen that you can't or haven't planned for - you will always have to improvise in those situations. Don't worry, there are a lot of resources out there, and you are a smart and resourceful person. And a little luck never hurts!

NOTE: in any desert (or field area) foreign to you, different rules might apply.