“I know you are tired. I am tired too.
Will you walk along the edge of the desert with me?
I would like to show you what lies before us.”
-Barry Lopez, Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven
It’s hot out – it’s only 10:30 in the morning and already you can feel the sun beating down on your face as you wander the desert looking for vegetation. The days of soup for dinner are long past, and your hands are sweating inside your gloves as you carry your collection back to the work site. As you stop to plant your next bush, you start to dream about anything from ice water, cold lemonade, watermelon, popsicles, rootbeer floats, Pony Espresso milkshakes and drinking strawberry daiquiris by the pool, to simply taking your pants off and lying in the shade.
So just how do you beat the heat? This hitch, as we hit the first 90-degree digits of the season, our crew decided to adopt the work schedule of our fellow Randy Jawboners and started our work day half an hour earlier. We also did our best to take a break from restoration in the afternoons to cruise up to the higher parts of Horse Canyon, where we monitored past crews’ restoration projects. Once you get into these higher elevations of Kiavah Wilderness, the true beauty of the California springtime heat shows itself in the form of carpets of vibrant wildflowers that fill the air with their sweet fragrance and the emergence of rodents and reptiles of various colors, shapes and sizes.
Alas, the greater problem of the desert is that once the heat wave subsides when you return to camp that night, the wind comes onto the scene as it roars down the canyon. So the question becomes, just how do you beat the gusts of 30mph plus that rage across the desert at a moments notice?
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This hitch our crew completed 19 effectiveness monitoring points, repaired 2 hard barriers, built 4 erosion control structures, and finished 8 restoration sites, for a total of 2,106.64 square meters of restoration and 282 vertical mulch planted.
