Day 5: Friday, April 16th, 2020

Summer is coming! To avoid, or at least kid ourselves that we are going to avoid, the worst of the afternoon heat humanitarian aid starts at some ungodly hour in the morning.

There are two ways to accomplish this. The first way is to get up at 4:30 in the morning, leave Ajo by 5am and drive to the hike starting point with the goal of starting hiking as the sun comes up at around 6:30am. No-one likes getting up while it is still dark, people do it, of course, but no-one actually likes it.

The second option is to drive to the hike starting point the evening before and camp in the desert. This way you get an extra hour or so of sleep, get up with the first sign of the sun at 5:20am and can be ready to go by 6:30 or even 6am if you have a super together crew who can get the morning fire going, make coffee, eat, brush teeth and be packed in 40 minutes.

Neither of these options are particularly appealing to me. I do not like waking up, let alone getting out of bed, while it is still dark outside. I am also not super fond of camping, I much prefer my bed and my pillow and my toaster to the back of the truck, or the ground, and a folded up sweater and slightly burnt, fire smoky tortillas.

However, needs must, and as much as these options suck in the moment, I am grateful for either one when the mercury hits the 90s and we can take a nice siesta between 2 and 4 pm.

Today, knowing that we had an 11.2 mile hike just to get to our search location in the Bryan Mountains, we selected option 2 and accordingly left Ajo in the afternoon for the 50 mile drive to camp in the Agua Dulce Mountains.

Being the time of COVID, everyone who is not already COVID bonded, had to drive their own vehicle. So, we had a crew of 7 people with 5 trucks. Humanitarian aid during COVID is not very environmentally friendly, we emit a lot of fossil fuels.

Humanitarian aid in the time of COVID is very clean. We brought a hand washing station, with a 5-gallon cube of water, hand soap, a bleach water spray bottle, paper towels and Clorox wipes. We had disposable gloves, personal bottles of hand sanitizer and individual dishcloths soaked in bleach in zip lock baggies. We wore a variety of masks from surgical to bandanas to ripped squares of cotton shirt (me) to stylish fabric made by members of the Ajo Samaritans. We also each had an N95 mask for use in medical emergencies and, in addition to our regular medical kit, we had a COVID kit with another hand sanitizer and full PPE (personal protective equipment) complete with instructions for putting it on and taking it off.

By 7pm in the evening, everyone was at the campsite. We ate our individually made, and therefore COVID free, dinners and made a plan for the next day’s search around our 3 campfires (so everyone could sit by a fire and be the COVID required 12 feet apart). We told stories and had a little celebration because it is my birthday tomorrow….