4/2/2025
The wind continued to howl most of the night, dying down shortly before dawn. Speaking of which: dawn. When do you suppose that first light of morning takes place? For me, pretty much no matter where we are this time of year, it’s 6-ish. You know, if you open your eyes at 6, you can tell it’s morning — or darn-near it. It’s very different than, say, 4 am. Here, 6 am is like 4 am. JET BLACK. It didn’t start to look like 6 am until 7 am. Is that because it is so close to the time zone line? Closer to Mountain time than Central? That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. But it’s also super weird.
Because the wind had died down and because of a thin veil of haze, it was quite pleasant! We lolled a bit and then headed up the road in the Bronco to do a hike into the canyon. All in, we had seen exactly two other occupied campsites out of the eight that we had passed. Interesting.
“Check-out time” for our site was noon, so we hiked back, packed up and drove out —deciding on the way to delay setting up the camper at the new site because the haze had burned off and the wind had picked up and — to be honest — we couldn’t face another afternoon in the furnace of camp. Instead, we headed to the Chisos Mountain area trailheads to escape the heat at a higher elevation. (Well, to be 100% transparent, we also wanted a little cell service…)
We did a short hike and, given we couldn’t really come up with any other stall tactics, headed to the new site — located on a much longer dirt road passing many more empty primitive sites. And here is why I said the whole process with the Ranger at check-in was “utter ridiculousness.” None of these empty sites were available to us — having been “reserved” on the — you guessed it — Recreation.gov site. At $10 a night and no penalty for no-shows, people reserve them for a week or more at a time and use them for maybe one or two nights on a weekend. It’s not cost prohibitive $70 for a whole week!) and abusers of the system have nothing to lose. Meanwhile all these sites site empty and rule-followers like us drive an hour past empty site after empty site for no reason. It’s a huge problem everywhere (Tetteguche and Split Rock in MN come to mind…) and extra frustrating on this day as we inched our way along the washed-out road toward the one available sub-optimal site that allowed a trailer on the desert floor. It was 100 degrees when we got there and — you guessed it again — windy as hell.
I won’t belabor my behavior. I was a giant baby. A huge, giant — extremely-buzzed — baby.
Dinner (Loaded Pho) and a shower — with washed hair — helped for a brief time. But when we crawled in to the camper, I kid you not, the interior showed it was 96 degrees. It was still ridiculously windy, but it was also still ridiculously hot. Dave fell asleep within seconds (as only Dave can do). I laid there for hours. The memory foam mattress was literally cooking my skin. I swear I could smell toxins emanating from beneath the sheets. I had my door open to receive the wind — assuming it would eventually cool off. But the wind was so strong it kept pulling the door from its magnetic attachment and banging against the fiberglass shell. Not good. So, I pulled it mostly shut but still cracked. But the vacuum that created caused it to blow open and then bang shut — over and over. So I fully closed it and felt the temperature crawl even higher. Finally, I got up, pulled out the screen for the large stargazer window (located above our heads), installed it and struggled to open the heavy window by myself against the wind and secure it on each side, crawling over Dave to do so (while Dave slumbered on…). This combination finally allowed me to fall asleep for a bit. It was around 2 am when the temperature finally broke and the wind let up a bit.
And, once again, morning was actually quite pleasant. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to have positive feelings about that site after the day before, but dammit, I did. Somehow, between going to bed and getting up, it seemed more green in the golden light of morning.
In answer to Dave’s main question that he kept asking the Ranger (“Is it private?”), we tipped back our heads and laughed and laughed. There was LITERALLY NO ONE OUT HERE. To punctuate that point, we walked around naked for a bit, brushing our teeth and making coffee (and tea). We could have never put our clothes on and been completely fine. While it was NOT “private” (you could see for miles), “privacy” was of no concern.
Still, as the sun rose higher, the temp rose in kind. And in a mind-melding instance of mind-reading, Dave and I both knew — without ever discussing it — we were NOT spending another night here. We were getting the hell of of dodge.
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