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.