Spring in Death Valley, End of the Visitor Season and Our Job

 

Spring has sprung in Death Valley, such as it is.  We leapt from high 70's and low 80's to 105 degrees in less than a week, and it has stayed there.  And to add insult to injury the wind has been howling.  It's been blowing so much and so hard that a 30mph day is the new norm for a calm day.  My satellite dish is rated for up to 50mph wind.  It's been stowed more than it has been deployed for the last month.

Despite repeatedly warning campers that their awnings and canopies were at risk, we have ended up with dozens of shredded canvases and bent awning arms and canopy legs piled up in front of our dumpsters.  Many tents have simply disappeared into the desert.  I'm sure there are salt cedars and mesquite trees with a variety of colored nylon in them somewhere, but with a geographic area the size of Connecticut it won't be soon seen.

Absent this spring is a bloom.  There has been virtually no moisture in a year.  Normally a cloud burst is enough to trigger dormant plants to burst through the desert crust covering them and explode in color.  It's brief but spectacular.  But not this year.  Not only has there not been a cloud burst, there hasn't been so much as a sprinkle or morning dew.

The picture of the storm at the top of the blog is as close as we get to wet weather.  Plenty of action on the mountains but anything that may fall out of a cloud over the valley evaporates long before it hits the ground.  They call it Verga.

There were plenty of spring storms to go around, some even got close.  But all stayed on one mountain range or the other.

Close but no cigar.
Actually a good thing as this is a hail shaft pounding the Panamint foothills.

As I hinted in the title of this blog, we are in the last days of our contract at Furnace Creek Campground, Death Valley, CA.  It's been six months and we have developed that "sitting still for an extended period spread".  Camp chairs, propane tank for the grill, the grill, water softener, drive-over cable protectors, and my "desk" complete with monitor, wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, 5 Tb external drive, printer, shredder, etc. etc.  Plus a plethora of odds and ends of routine daily living that will all have to be broken down and secured for travel.

There is routine maintenance too.  The camper has collected a desert-full of dust on its exterior.  With single digit humidity and constant wind the exterior surfaces have become highly charged and dust is sticking like glue.  I got approval to use a water-only power washer to put the desert back where it came from.  First order of business was to recharge the water softener.  We were just beginning to get spots on the dishes so it was time.  It took two days to get everything washed off the rig.

Speaking of water, RV's have some unique maintenance needs when it comes to the water heater.  A weird thing called galvanic corrosion occurs.  A water heater tank would consume itself if it were not for a sacrificial device called an anode.  The anode takes the brunt of the corrosion, lessoning/slowing the corrosion on the tank.  The anode rod gets consumed over time and needs to be periodically replaced, every six months to a year, depending on water condition and other factors.  I am way overdue to inspect/replace my anode.  If you read my previous blogs while we were in North Carolina you suffered through me whining about all the maintenance work that had to be done while we spent a year parked in our daughter's family RV pad next to their shop.  There were so many emergency and critical repairs that I let some of the routine stuff, like changing the water heater anode, go undone.  Not any more.

Yikes!!  I procrastinated too long!

I'm used to pulling an anode and it looking pitted or like it had been gnawed on by a rat.  Never have I seen an extra-long toothpick.  Anyway, it's fixed now.  I'm good for awhile.

I had one last chore to do for the park.  There are collection points in each of the campgrounds for discarded propane fuel bottles.  We (camp hosts) periodically collect them and take them to the park service's boneyard to be ventilated (puncture them) and put in a shipping container.  All of our collection points were full and we were the last campground volunteers left in the park trained to ventilate propane bottles.  So, tag, we're it.

The wide angle of the camera makes the pickup bed look ultra short but it's actually a six foot bed.  When I started it was full.  The venting table (kind of center-right) is a simple fixture to hold the bottle, it has a hinged arm with a spike on it to puncture the bottles.  It's all manual, sort of like using an old paper cutter.  Except paper never had a nearly full charge of propane that would make things exciting.

Our last two weeks were punctuated with two planned power outages.  This was serious work, the sub-station that fed the entire park is being completely overhauled along with 14 large power poles being replaced.  A lot of the work was in hard to access locations and equipment and men had to be helicoptered in.  I don't mean the helicopter landed and let people out, no, these men and machines were flown in on the end of a 200 foot cable and let off while the helicopter hovered above.  I'd like to complain about the wicked heat with no electricity for ten hours but then I think about those men doing hard, physical work in fire retardant coveralls, gloves and boots while I sit in the shade of my camper and can't bring myself to do it.

We're done.  Departure date April 17th.  Next stop, a week-long layover in North Las Vegas at the Clark County Shooting Complex.  We're going to do a little R&R but also get some help with my satellite wiring, my Verizon jetpack (it just stopped working and my account has been deleted), and my new iPhone (it absolutely will not share my location).

After three days, running all over Las Vegas to find a genius bar and a corporate Verizon store and an appointment with Satellite World, we fixed one out of the three.  The TV satellite is fully functional again.  Thanks Satellite World, you other two can go pound sand!

We've also done some serious shopping in preparation for our next remote gig.  We hit Sam's Club and Super Walmart hard, twice.  Every nook and cranny is stuffed with staples.  

And that brings me to what our next gig is.  We've been approached by a former Volunteer Supervisor to come to work for her at her new position at Devils Tower in Wyoming.  We'll be working for the interpretive group and operating the visitor center and doing trail guiding.  So tomorrow we leave Las Vegas and head north to our first of three stops on the way to Devil's Tower.  We may have been well into the heat in Death Valley but the picture of our campsite that was sent to us had snow on it.  I hope they have some warm days before we get there.