Bugging Out

I finally couldn’t take it anymore; the latest attack on my computer came from someone using IE-5 and the attack originated from a .ru address, so I decided to bugout to the desert again. This was last week, and I determined to get fairly extreme ‘down in the desert’. As I am now 75 years old, it would be a measured  test of my endurance, and my wife’s patience. We set off for a week-long excursion, and once there, the air temperature at our first waypoint was 115 degrees F. The ground temperature was about 140 degrees F. and you can fry an egg on a rock at this temperature. I expected this, and brought plenty of water. On the drive to get there, when the mountains of my home gave way to desert Slickrock, my wife remarked, “You are going nearly 100 miles per hour, and you are beginning to glow.”

“So what?”, I replied, “As long as the Tequila holds out, I’m good to go!”

She sniffed at this, and declared, “You are in your natural habitat; you weird lizard!”

I could not deny the truth of this remark, because whenever I get into the Slickrock country, I have a tendency to leap out of the car at the first opportunity and start doing lizard pushups on any convenient hot and flat sandstone slab while flicking my tongue in and out rapidly.

 

 Like a comic book superhero, I am transformed 

Well, be that as it may, I was glad to enter this domain of the quick and the dead. I did endure a life-threatening episode at 11,000 feet altitude in the LaSalle Mountains near Moab, Utah. As I have mentioned before in this blog, I have a fairly advanced case of Emphysema, and because my home is at 5230 ft. elevation, and I routinely hike (slowly) at 8,000 ft, I thought I could handle the elevation of the rough LaSalle loop road. It had been raining hard for several days and the rough road was nearly impassible. As I drove up the treacherous road carved out of the side of a cliff, with a 1,000 ft. drop-off onto the valley floor, I had an oxygen crisis. I almost passed out, and had to saddle my poor wife with the hairy drive up to the pass at 11, 500 ft. altitude, and down, down, the steep grade of rain-soaked crumbling road as fast as she could to the valley floor in the desert south of Moab. It was a Pucker-factor 10 episode that completely freaked her out. I was too oxygen-deprived to care; all I wanted to do was go to sleep.

 

 Well, enough of the drama. I learned my lesson, and I plan on asking my doctor for a prescription for a portable oxygen apparatus, so I can climb and ski to my heart’s content. In the meantime, I thought I should share a few photos from the trip with my valued readers. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll shut up and let the pictures speak. As a final note, in Arizona near Tuba City on the Navajo Reservation, I made friends with a very smart Hopi Indian from the Snake Clan, who had an electrical engineering degree, and he shared his mutton stew and fry bread with me and my wife.

 

Far above the Colorado River near Moab, Utah 

 Me: ready to get down and dirty. The LaSalle mountains are in the distance. 

 

 The mountain range in the distance is the Abajos; the line of sight is about 80 miles

 

 The mighty Colorado River, about 2,000 ft below my position 

  

A tranquil place on the Colorado River bottoms