Search and Recovery

Yesterday morning (Saturday) I slept in until 8 a.m. which is extremely late in the desert, generally I have been getting up with the first signs of sunrise. I enjoyed the ultimate in luxuries, a nice long shower and got dressed in regular non-desert clothes to catch the best of the Farmer’s Market. I arrived at the Market at 9:30 a.m. and stopped by the library to grab some wifi and check my messages. The first message I saw announced a Search and Recovery (SAR) beginning at 10:30 a.m. just south of the Border Patrol checkpoint on I 85…like that my plans changed. I rushed home to get my desert boots, hat and backpack, then hurtled down the 85 to meet up with the SAR team from Aguilas del Desierto. I pulled up at the location, which was packed with cars, just around 10:35 a.m. and hoofed it out to catch up with the group already lining up to begin the search.

SAR is exciting! There was a long line of people spaced 20 feet apart covering about a mile, ready to start walking slowly out into the desert checking washes, clumps of saguaro and lone palo verde trees for signs of the missing person. As we began to walk out I was so sure we would find him, at every tree I expected to see him sitting there waiting patiently to be found.

After about 2 hours we stopped for a break. Everyone took out their lunches and drinks. In my haste I had forgotten to bring a lunch, plus in my head I had decided that we would only be out there for an hour or so before we located him. Luckily, I had a can of Sun Vista beans in my pack, so I ate those and felt very much like a desert professional, out finding a person with only a can of beans and a gallon of water for sustenance. I also had a couple of blankets and three pairs of socks, which I felt he would appreciate, as he might be cold, and his feet might be sore when we found him.

We continued searching until a call came over the radio to head back over to the road. We gathered up and were told that it seemed we were in the wrong location. The maps were reviewed, and the cars shuttled up from the original parking spot to the point where we had re-joined the road. Then a long line of vehicles pulled out and headed as a caravan to the newly determined location.

The process of lining up was not so orderly this time. As the sun began to set we headed out into the desert in a much more haphazard fashion, everyone keen to find the man before darkness called off the search. No-one wanted him to spend another night alone in the desert. Again, it was a forlorn hope, as evening closed in scattered groups of 2 or 3 searchers headed back to their vehicles, while the organizers tried to ensure everyone was accounted for before the caravan of headlights wound its way back to town for the night.

This morning (Sunday) was back to the regular desert routine, I got up at 6:30 a.m., ate breakfast, gave my teeth a cursory brush and packed up lunch, water, snacks, maps, GPS and compass. This time I was going to be properly prepared for a long day. The caravan reformed at 8 a.m. and drove to where we had left off the night before. I no longer had illusions of a quick search and home for a nice lunch. I was in it for the long haul, hours of checking vegetation, scrambling through washes, debating the likely route the man may have taken and reforming the search line where it had collapsed or broken due to a particularly deep wash or gnarly hill. We kept at it for 8 hours before our old enemy time forced us to again call it a day with no success.

Where is this man? His companions left him a week ago Monday with a gallon of water, a couple of cans of tuna and a blanket. He had hurt his knee and could not keep up with their pace. They called in to the Aguilas del Desierto with the best information they could about where and when they left him.

Most of the searchers must go back to work tomorrow (Monday). I have the privilege of desert aid being my full-time life. I can keep looking. I have some leads to follow but the window of time to find him alive has narrowed to a sliver of the barest chance. What began, for me, as a search full of hope on Saturday has become a recovery full of dread. They told me to look for the birds.

Exploring the Growlers

The desert is huge and trying to figure out how to get water to people crossing it is the subject of endless speculation and conjecture. In the summer I was part of a crew that placed a 5-mile water line across the Growler valley in the hope that people crossing would find it in a vast flat expanse with no clear trails.

On the eastern edge of the valley, the Growler Mountains, named after miner John Growler, stretch from Bates Well on Organ Pipe National Monument in the South up through Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge to the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range in the North. Their multiple peaks and ridge-lines tower more than 1,000 feet over the desert floor and their southern foothills are a mass of deep washes, jutting fingers and small hills. Crossing through one of the many saddles along the range, the Growlers hold something of a surprise, instead of dropping down as sharply as they rise up, they flatten out to a wide plateau with gently sloping valleys interspersed with secondary ridges and hilltops. Beautiful as they are, the Growler’s upper valleys are deadly. Having made it up the steep climb from the South the need for water and food can quickly become desperate.

The Arizona GIS for Deceased Migrants shows more deaths in the Growlers than anywhere else in the deserts around Ajo. Accordingly, over the past week it has been our mission to explore the Growlers, looking for trails and identifying trail intersections and resting places where humanitarian aid supplies are most likely to reach people in need.

The exploration has generally been a success, we have found well-used trails and resting places. However, like all good explorations, in addition to providing answers, it has thrown up new questions. Some are practical - How are people getting to a seemingly inaccessible resting place? Which direction do they travel after they exit the plateau? Is there a trail along the ridge-line connecting the plateau valleys? Others are thornier and more emotionally challenging. On 2 of our 5 hikes in the Growlers we have found skeletal remains, for me the most challenging is balancing my emotional and practical response this occurrence.

For me, skeletal remains do not provoke the same sensory reaction as more recent deaths. There is not the over-powering smell that clings to your nose, your clothes, your boots long after you leave the site. There is not the same tactile response of touching flesh or the same visual response of seeing a full person.

What is similar is the profound sense of silence and aloneness, of trying to connect to the feeling of the person as they waited for the inevitable, the feelings of those they were possibly with and the worry of their families and friends who have no idea what happened to them.

When we find a person, I try to sit and look around, to visualize what they might have seen. I hope that as they let go of the struggle against the physical violence of dehydration, heat or cold and the mental anguish of realizing they could not go on, they found peace in the beauty of the mountains and slid gently into being a part of the soul of the desert.

After a few moments the call to action rushes back over me, the desire to do everything I can to help ensure that the person might be identified. To identify the person can give them back their person-hood and return them to their community; comfort their fellow travelers that, even though they may have had to go on, someone cares enough to follow their footsteps and find their companion; and give closure to loved ones left back in their country of origin. I have less purely altruistic responses too, it makes me feel useful, like I am making some small contribution to alleviate the suffering of one family, one group, one traveler.

All these responses draw me back to keep on exploring in the Growlers. We will unlock their secrets, find their lost and share their stories.

Do you know where you are going?

For the past 27 years I have been an urban wolf. During the 1990s my primary habitat was the DC streets and nightclubs, first as a bike messenger and later as a bartender, where my idea of Mexican food meant a trip to Burrito Brothers. After the millennium, my world changed, expanding to include theatres and art spaces, museums, historical sites and bougie Mexican tapas in DC and Detroit. A couple of weeks ago, for the final weekend of 2018, I went full feral desert wolf - back country camping in the Sonoran Desert. Here is my handy guide to staying warm and not getting lost in the desert…

How to not be cold in the desert at night…

The temperature was set to drop close to freezing so my most important consideration was staying warm at night. I really hate sleeping bags, they are so confining and claustrophobic. Having tried various experiments with different combinations of blankets, over the past 3 weeks of living in a barn, I hoped I had hit on the magic ratio of under to over blankets. Accordingly, I filled the back seat of the Ford F150 with my tent, a foil emergency blanket, sleeping pad, sleeping bag (acceptable if unzipped to the feet), and 5 FEMA blankets. If you have never seen a FEMA blanket, they do not look very enticing, they are made of felt and carry the, not very comforting notice, that they “do not contain DDT” and warn you not to wash them. But they are really, really, really warm. Frankly, I don’t care if they contain napalm; better a short, warm life, than a long cold one!

First set up your tent in full sun, this allows all the bedding inside to capture as much warmth as possible during the day. Once the tent is up, line the floor with the foil emergency blanket. Next comes the first layer of FEMA blanket and the sleeping pad. On top of the sleeping pad, place another FEMA blanket then the unzipped sleeping bag. Double fold the third FEMA blanket and encase the feet area of the sleeping bag. The fourth and fifth FEMA blankets go on top of the sleeping bag. When you are on your way to bed, grab a sixth FEMA blanket from the back of your pick-up truck and throw it into the tent for good measure. Lastly, take the clothes you plan to wear tomorrow and place them between the sleeping bag and the bottom FEMA blanket. If you follow these instructions you will wake up in the middle of the night because you are too hot, have to get naked and in the morning, you will have nice warm toasty clothes all ready to put on before you have to climb out from under the mountain of blankets.

How to not get lost in the desert…

I have visions of myself as a rugged desert wolf, able to find my way by the position of the sun by day and the stars by night. Of course, these visions are simply castles in the air, the sun does not cooperate by starting exactly due East in the morning and I have absolutely no ability to identify individual stars or constellations, much less any knowledge of where they are in relation to the earth.

Before heading out for the weekend I visited to REI to purchase a GPS and almost had a heart attack when I looked in the case and saw the prices! I got a good, old fashioned compass for $20.

Compasses look simple. You hold them in front of you and they tell you which direction you are heading. Except they don’t, they tell you where North is, and even more confusing they tell you where magnetic North is. And magnetic North changes its relationship to true North depending on where you are in the world. To combat this deficiency you have to figure out your “declination”, or the variance between magnetic North and true North for your location and adjust your compass accordingly. This turned out to be easier than it sounds, good maps include a declination angle in the legend and good compasses have a little screw that you can turn to set the declination for wherever you are. Cheaper ($20) compasses do not have the little declination screw so you just draw a line in sharpie for the angle of magnetic North on your compass.

Once you have finished messing around with the declination and start walking a new issue arises; the Compass needle does not point in the direction you are going, it always points to magnetic North! To figure out where you are actually going, you have to move the “direction of travel arrow” on the baseplate to point to your desired direction, while keeping the compass needle still pointing true North. Then, you start walking following the direction of travel arrow while keeping the needle at or around the sharpie mark you made early for magnetic North.

This is as far as I have made it with the compass. I can walk in approximately the right direction, but I have not even the beginnings of a clue how to tell when I should stop. That is a lesson for next week when I have time to spend the whole day at the library on You Tube.

It may be a while before I am as comfortable navigating my current habitat of stars and saguaros as I am roaming the streets of my urban homes. For now, being warm and snug at night and having an approximate idea of where I am and the direction I am going by day, seems like a good start.