It wasn’t until The Riley Store that I remembered I hadn’t brought my sleeping bag. That’s a pretty significant omission. It doesn’t inspire your team very much with your level of expertise and camping experience so I didn’t make a big deal about it.
Unfortunately, with the Riley store situated in the middle of nowhere, everything in it fell under the heading of rare or endangered and therefore everything was exponentially more expensive then, say, if I bought it on sale at Bi-mart. Besides, we were entering the heat of the day, and just how cold can it get at night in the desert anyway? So with a sense of unwarranted pride and denial, I managed to repress this issue until night had fallen and it came time to unroll my sleeping bag.
My first idea was to put on all the clothes I had packed and hope my tent could make up the difference, but it wasn’t long before I found I was shivering. The way my tent is constructed, the rain-fly acts as the roof and it’s the only thing that keeps the heat in. That rain-fly worked more efficiently though when I took it down and wrapped it around me burrito-style.
Finally comfortable, I tried to stay awake and watch, through the top of my tent, the stars’ hourly testimony regarding the Earth’s off-axis twirling. Meteors would wait for me to give up looking for them and then shoot across the sky so fast I thought I imagined them. Soon enough, blazing Van Gogh stars whirled like dervishes in my dreams.
TANGENT ALERT!
I’ve just tried to give you a glimmer of an idea of what it’s like to be in a tent on a desert plateau beneath the Milky Way. But, as I reviewed my photo archives, it became apparent that I hadn’t actually taken a picture from the perspective of inside my tent. I guess, in real life, you don’t necessarily know what the ‘photo moments’ are going to be, or, for one reason or another, you may lack the coordination and patience to operate your camera (thank you Kip’s new Margarita recipe!). Yet, despite the shivering, and the middle of the night repurposing of equipment, those moments of awe beneath the gaze of the universe…well, those are the moments.
The only thing I can tell you for sure is that none of my pictures do those moments justice. I still want to try to share them though, so in this case, I thought I could suggest the scene via a combination of photos that I did take.
First, I found this picture of the Milky Way from that same night. The Montero and the Jeep are visible at lower right. I’m facing South for this picture, but my tent was orientated East-West and I was laying on my back with my head to the East. That means I had to re-orientate the sky like this…
Now the South side of the picture is at left. Also I’ve zoomed in a little bit to replicate the fact that I’ll only be able to see a portion of the view through the top of my tent. Technically, that’s the sky from that night, though technically, it obviously can’t be exactly the same portion I was able to see looking through the top of the tent while lying down.
The next image I need is the inside of my tent. I found one from an old trip near the Deschutes River. I take some time to painstakingly cut out the segments of the picture that have sky in them and then I use the leftover tent bits as a frame.
Then I work at trying to make the layers fit together, darkening the colors evident in the tent to match the night. Since I’ve cut out the mosquito netting in the original tent picture, I insert an exaggerated canvas texture into the star picture to simulate the missing netting. The net result is a composite which seems accurate to my memory. It’s the real sky from that night. It’s really my tent. The parts that don’t seem correct to me are the stars - how bright and clear they were - and how they twinkled.
But a real picture wouldn’t show that either. In fact, in this particular picture, my light-painting of the foreground convinced the camera’s white-balance auto-adjustment feature to paint the sky a hideous magenta color that I couldn’t stomach, and, not smart enough to correct the color balance manually, I settled for de-saturation. The arrow, by the way, points to my topless tent (people who bring their sleeping bags evidently don’t need to set up their tents). As you can see, I’m not trying to pull a fast one over on you with my composite photo.
I’ve provided this photography tangent for the sake of transparency and hopefully to preserve my integrity as a reliable narrator.
Speaking of photographic integrity. Our next stop was The Pillars of Rome. Sounds exotic, doesn’t it? As context, I should point out that planning these trips is an unlikely beer-fueled brainstorming process that most resembles disparate dogs meeting each other at a random dog park. I’m tempted to characterize just how disparate we are, but I think I’ll limit my remarks to myself and say that the Kip, Rico, and Deb triumvirate is a rare association where the Vulcan philosophy of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations isn’t just a corny science fiction concept…or at least it’s an environment where I can make a nerdy observation like that and not be ridiculed and exiled…I think…mostly.
We try to be sensitive to each other’s interests, whether that’s blasting bunnies with a shotgun, mastering off-road skills, or capturing scenic landscapes. I had steeped myself in internet images of The Pillars of Rome to the point that I had begun to believe it might be one of the seven wonders of the world, and having mentioned it at a planning meeting, Rico did his due diligence and fit it into our itinerary.
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| One of Rico's pictures + one of my pictures combined |
I wonder. Would people come to visit my backyard if I called it The Layered Gardens of Nebuchadnezzar? Would they be disappointed to see out-of-control blackberries and an old apple tree tipping over?
‘Marketing’ really makes a difference.
Later as our two vehicle convoy winds its way through Rome, I see that these land-forms are common and taken for granted by the locals.
We leave Rome behind in our dust trails and venture out into refreshingly unremarked-upon land.
Rico and Kip continue to follow inscrutable markings and symbols on their GPS devices. The idea is to find a way into the canyon. Somewhere down there at the bottom of the canyon is a river.
We follow way-points and coordinates gleaned from specialized internet forums rather than the tentative, outdated, dashed lines that appear on our maps and which are optimistically described as jeep trails. We have managed to drop some distance down the side of the canyon, to a point where the road below seems tantalizingly close.
But a few more bouncy miles around the next switchback reveals another washed-out section of road standing between us and our goal. Rico and Kip hike down to the blockage and compare the appearance of the problematic terrain to their self-perceived skill-sets and to the capabilities of their vehicles. They have to consider how much gas we have left, what our plan of action is if one of the vehicles get stuck, and how much water remains. Then, assuming they can negotiate the path down, will they be able to do it again coming back up? If they can’t, do we have enough gas to find another way out?
Once again the verdict is - too risky. We don’t even know for sure if there is a suitable place to camp down there. We manage to turn around on the single-lane track and begin our climb back up to level ground when a Ford pick-up truck pulls up. We stop and exchange greetings and we warn the old white-haired octogenarian couple inside about the washed out section of road that lies before them.
I can see a walker in the back of their truck and I’m thinking it would be pretty bad if those two got stuck out here. The old man driving is cordial and polite and he listens to us, but he doesn’t seem too concerned. He decides to drive on around the corner to see for himself. We hang around briefly, just in case they get in trouble and need assistance, but it isn’t too long before down below, we see the dust trail from his truck as it speeds away across the canyon floor.
Well…we still have other way-points to check out. Who knows, maybe we'll decide to come back this way when that old guy isn't looking.
In the meantime, there are other options which look very promising.
(To be continued...)
Did you miss Part One? Follow this link:
Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Boglands (Part One)
Part Three can be found here: Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Boglands (Part Three)
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