I always
assumed that On our first
night we met up with friends Emily and Marty for a hike at her desert study
site (see ARIZONA April 2003)
along with Mike, a student who’s doing grad work there. We were also joined by (another) Mike and
Steve, a pair of visiting herpetologists from
Came across a
Desert Tortoise dining on a late night snack, its face smeared with garish
lipstick from the messy fruit of a prickly pear cactus.
Eventually Danny and I got separated
from Emily and Marty, so we decided to head back towards the road and wait
for everyone by the cars. Thinking I
knew where we were, I led us off in one direction, only to discover after two
hours of wandering that we were walking in circles! Using the silhouette of falsely familiar
hills, I could swear the road was just around the next bend, but Danny’s GPS
kept pointing in the opposite direction over a rocky slope I was reluctant to
climb in the dark. Based on the skyline,
the orientation just didn’t make sense, and I insisted that something must be
wrong (turned out to be me). Tried to reach Mike and his crew by
walkie-talkie, but the steep surrounding peaks interfered with our radio
signal and all we could hear was static.
At one point we climbed to a higher elevation to see if we could spot
the others, only to watch their lights receding in the distance, moving
further away from us until they vanished altogether. Visions of being stranded at night started
to seem like a real possibility, comforted only by the companionship of
creatures we continually found crawling underfoot (it helps to have a
distorted definition of creature comforts when you’re lost in the desert at
At last we reached Mike by radio and
he gave us directions to find the cars (just where Danny and his GPS had been
pointing --- lesson learned). We rounded
a hill and headed down towards the lights, where we were greeted by shouts
of, “Danny, Eitan, come quick: Gila!!”
One of the specimens being studied at the field site had been tracked
using telemetry equipment, so we all had a chance to marvel at its beauty in
the glow of our lanterns.
Marty was also showing a couple of
beautiful snakes he’d found after Danny and I were separated from him. Just our luck to miss seeing them in situ, but Marty was kind enough to
bring them back for the whole group to ad
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