The Dust Storm and the Earthgrazer
Today I learned about a hike at Petrified Forest called Devil’s Playground. “You’re a hiker and you don’t know about Devil’s Playground?” one of the park rangers said. “They only offer three permits per week, you know.” Panicked, I rushed off to the visitor’s center to see about getting one.
“Oh!” said Seville, one of my favorite park employees, “I’m not sure where those are...” Seville called over to Max, who also works at the visitor’s center and I think sometimes throws shade my way. Guess I don’t have to worry about permit competition. Soon two park rangers had also joined the search while giving a hearty attempt to scare me out of the hike. “Takes about half a day to get there!” one of them says. “There are ghosts!” says the other. As long as there aren’t dinosaurs, I think. Still, I begin to think I might be rushing into this hike. I let the trail name roll over my tongue; Devil’s… Playground… Is it playful or dangerous? I can’t tell. And it can’t be a good sign that so few people ask for this permit that no one even knows where they are. This is the federal government- they love paperwork.
Twenty minutes later, fully permitted, I am on the hunt for the trailhead. It’s a backcountry hike and the directions I’d been given devolve to “follow the hairpin turn, take a left, park at the top of the hill, walk back the way you came, take another left, cross the wash, and find the tamarind0 bush with the first trail marker.”
Seriously? Find a bush? No wonder no one attempts this hike. Let me tell you a little something about the desert, NPS cartographers: there are a lot of bushes out here. And a lot of lefts. And a lot of hills, washes, hairpin turns, and, for the record, bones of things that have died out here, the latter of which I do not wish to join. It took an hour of wandering around in the 90 degree heat, two disturbed jackrabbits, and a full-body reapplication of sunscreen before I lucked into the right tamarindo bush. Saved! I begin to follow the trail markers. This lasted for exactly two trail markers. The third was nowhere to be seen. I decided that rather than spend another hour wandering around the dried up riverbed that is the Lithodendron Wash, I would follow my guts. I cast off the onus of following society’s markers and I hiked cheerfully to the top of a canyon, down to the bottom, and up the other side. There, over a mile from where I set off, was a trail marker. I shook my head in disbelief. Am I a trail master or a trail blaze failure? I can’t quite tell. My initial rebelliousness has now faded into a healthy curiosity about where these markers actually lead so I follow them until I reached the spot where the trail markers end and the wilderness officially begins. Wilderness, in case you were wondering, begins at a barbed wire fence and it looks like this:
Devil’s playground? More like a sunset sea! I want to bring my five year old self here. She would go nuts over walking on pink earth and hiking through little purple mountains. Pictures don’t do justice to the shock of pastel color that sweeps across the land out here. The painted desert is a five year olds fairytale land. And like in any good fairytale, the realm is well protected. To gain access to this realm I have to climb down the steep canyon wall comprised of boulders piled on top of sandstone, aka shaky rocks. I am essentially climbing down a gigantic, pastel sandcastle with no clue when the tide’s coming in. I try not to think about all the holes in the rocks and how far down they lead.
Safely arrived in the sunset sea, I spend the morning climbing up to the tops of hodooified hills like the one above and exploring the little caves beneath them. By noon I’m getting better at figuring out where to put my feet on this crumbling land. By 1pm I feel a gust of wind that I know, after only a few weeks here, means that rain is coming. The roads I took to get to this part of the park are impassible in wet weather so I book it back to my car, which is over an hour away, lest I be stuck in Devil’s Playground for the night. Just as I open my car door I see lightning strike the sunset sea. The first drops of rain fall on my head.
When I arrive back at the park proper I look out over the same wash I watched the crazy monsoon from. In addition to a thunderstorm, there is a dust storm rolling in. I had never seen a dust storm before but now I have seen and tasted one. I have also cleaned up after one since I’d left all of my windows open at the casita. It soon began to rain at a good clip but the ground was so dry after a few days without rain that the drops were absorbed into the earth in seconds and left no trace of moisture. The wind kicked up and I took shelter in The Painted Inn, watching the dust blow by.
By sunset, the sky had cleared, which was a good thing because tonight was the second night of Bio Blitz. As we were driving down the road, eyes on the ground, a streak of red light flashed across the sky.
“Look!” said Britney.
“Whoa! … … … Is it still…?”
“Yeah, it’s still…”
“This is…”
“I can’t believe…”
Earthgrazers are extremely rare meteors that only occur in the early evening and skim Earth’s atmosphere leaving a long tail behind them. The one we saw was as red as the sunset and lasted at least ten full seconds. The truck behind us saw it, too, and later reported that they were half convinced we were all about to die.
It was the first night of the Perseid meteor shower. I’d just about given up hope of seeing starry night skies in monsoon season but when I stepped outside tonight at 1 am, just after moonset, I was met with a perfectly clear sky and an unobstructed view of the milky way. I couldn’t breathe for a moment. I rushed back inside to put on a jacket (it gets into the low sixties here at night) and headed back out to gawk. I stayed up until first light, wrapped up in my sleeping bag, as hundreds of shooting stars with long, bright trails crossed the sky. After weeks of thunder claps following flashes of light in the sky I was braced for earsplitting noise but tonight the sky was gentle and the desert was silent. I felt tiny, exhilarated, and grateful to be alive as the sun rose on the park, my August home.
