Remember when you were a kid and someone taught you to count the seconds between the lightning flash and the thunderclap to work out how far away the storm was?
Continue readingTag: nevada
Sometimes you want to be way off the beaten track. Miles from civilization. Not another human in sight. Like in March 2020, with Covid-19. Well, if you live in a big city and don’t own a car, you’re pretty much down to reminiscence.
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“I don’t have time for this right now”, she said gruffly into the phone. And she was busy – for a burger bar in a small village in the desert hundreds of miles from anywhere, this place was hopping. If it was film noir, she’d have said, “of all the burger joints in all the towns in all the world, an alien walks into mine”.
Because this wasn’t any old roadside dive. This was the Little A’le’inn in Rachel, Nevada, just about a stone’s throw from one of the most secretive locations on Planet Earth, Ground Zero for the 90s alien conspiracy folklore that fuelled the X-Files, Independence Day and Men in Black: Area 51.
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Our preparation for the nearly 4,000 meter Wheeler Peak in Nevada was not nearly as detailed as many people, including us, do for Borneo’s Mt Kinabalu. This was mostly because Mt Kinabalu is a high volume tourist machine, and Wheeler is happily remote and undeveloped, so you’re not forced to stay at a hostel overnight and make your summit push at 2am. You just wake up and climb it. This probably explains why I was so puffed on the last push to Wheeler’s summit. That, and the 15 kg child on my shoulders.
Continue readingStanding alone at night on the rim of a giant crater in a desert beneath the Milky Way, I had two strong feelings. First, I viscerally understood why Neil Armstrong said the lunar surface “has a stark beauty all its own. It’s like much of the high desert of the United States”. True enough, that night in the high desert of the United States looked to me a lot like pictures of the moon. Second, and more powerfully, I suddenly felt like all that open space was somehow crushing me, this tiny creature on the side of a cliff beneath the vastness of that black, endless, infinite sky.
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