We are going to momentarily skip a few weeks in the trip and jump forward to where we are now. The desert, now when I say desert I'm not reffering to the beautiful red sandstone walls and wide canyons that may iniatally come to mind. I'm talking of a place called DEATH VALLEY. Death is a pretty acurate term in this instance as this place did it's darndest to kill us.
After a long day of migrating south, we were HOT, tired, hungry, and mostly thirsty. Nevada tends to monitor their water rather closely and it's extremely hard to come across without breaking down and purchasing it. We finally ran across a lonely rest stop, the only one in hundreds of miles, and lushishly filled up with about 10 gallons of water. Finding it interesting that previous to coming upon this reststop, we could have easily stopped at a handful of brothels or other adult entertainment venues along a very deserted highway. We lathargically load ourselves back into the hot and sweaty turtle and continue our way towards California. We've about had enough of the sun soaked car ride and we are both getting pretty cranky when we see the most incredible Sahara desert-like sand dune in the distance. Of course, intruiged by its magnificance we decide this is where we will camp tonight ( of course after we slip slide down its soft slopes). We set off into god forsaken no-mans land and finally after miles of a wandering dirt road--which remains nameless on Google maps--we sneak off on a lesser main side road to get us up and close to the dune.
The turtle did us proud and made it a brave 3/4 mile up the road when all turns sour and things take a turn for the worse. As we were chugging along, we realize that we are sinking. Sinking into nothing but pillowy cloud like fluffy sand. This is bad, this is real bad. We have sunk a couple thousand pound turtle i.e. van, have no 4x4 drive, its 100 degrees out, and the road we so foolishly left has no name even if we could get help. The positives in this situation; we have cell service, so if we can figure out where the hell we are then maybe someone can charge us $1000 to come pull us out, or also get themselves stuck. We have water, and lots of it at this point. Lastly, before we ducked off the main road we saw a cluster of houses in the distance that we could bike to and ask for some help....but we are stubborn and insistenly decide that we can do this ourselves. We begin brainstorming on how to get us out of this pickle. The only logical decision is to build a road. And for next day and half that's exactly what we do.
We grabbed our climbing packs and headed out scouring the desert for rocks that we could lay down to cobble a road for the turtle to be suspended on. Trip after trip of rock gathering we ended up developing a smooth system; Sam would go and scrounge up rocks while I stayed back and pieced us together a road. On one of his treks he came across a luggage carrying platform and drug this back to implent into our cobbled highway. We continue to plug away like this until the sun sets and finally call it quits so we can get some much needed calories and shut eye before waking up and starting again in the morning.
6AM comes way too fast with coffee on and the heat of the desert coming in at full force, it's time to get up and start working. The first couple hours aren't too bad, relatively pleasant in-fact. Once the sun decides it's out to play for the day, it doesn't kid around with temps nearing 100 and no shade. You really can't drink enough water in this type of enviornment as the sun instantly rips away any sort of sweat that would come out of you, dehydration stays present on the mind as we pump H2O into our systems. As much as we tried to stay ahead,I'm hurting, everytime I stand up I'm having to stable myself as my world starts spinning and spots of black are running across. Realizing it's time to take a food break, we jump into the van and review our situation. While in the van we placed a zip lock bag on top of the metal stove cover and it melted and fumed in a matter of seconds, this is how hot it is!...(later realizing that we had left the burner on full blast and more than likely could have exploded the entire turtle) whoops! Currently, we have only accomplished 1/4 the distance we need to cover before we are in the clear but decide that we should move the turtle onto the cobbled road to see if this plan is actually going to pan out like we see in our minds.
Holding our breath, we slowly creep the van onto the cobbled pathway. AND....it holds!..well for a second, as we back up into less consolidated sand the van sputters our delicately placed cobbled rocks everywhich way creating a complete and utter disaster. Still not giving up we grab the lids off of our rubber maid containers and foot by foot we place the lid on top of the rocks for the wheel of the van to get traction on. This works for awhile until the back wheels start spinning and digging a deep and disgusting hole that we have to figure out. Thinking that this is the end of us, we look up and see a small SUV coming straight towards us. It's our lucky day I'd say. Hurrying over to the vehicle we are estatic that they will be able to go find a tow truck. With smiles from ear to ear we get to their car window, and they are Italians. Italians who know not a word of English. GAH BLAST UGH! We all exchange some odd hand signals, looking like a bunch of alien robots in the middle of the desert, but apparently enough for them to understand to turn around and go back the way they came. Note: next time we plan on getting stuck in the desert, we will be fluent in Italian...neither of which will ever happen. Back at it for a few more hours until we finally come up with a tedious yet very workable system using the rubbermaid lids and the luggage grate. Eight hours later, we finally push over our final hump and are in the free and clear. Lessons learned: turtles don't go off-road, and we are now in business to cobble you a beatiful handmade dessert road!
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