Lessons can be learned.
Boy! Truer words were never spoken, Pete. I agree completely. The *best* campsites for my desert travel are always in dry washes -- smooth, sandy, pleasant -- and I never,
ever use them for this very reason.
There's several things I *really* don't want to happen to me on-tour:
1) Get run over by a car or truck.
2) Get caught in a flash-flood, especially when sleeping and so unable to escape in time or at all.
3) Get caught in a wildfire of my own making. When the air temps are 52°C and ground temps are 60°C, the plants dry out and the oil-rich ones like mesquite and sage become kindling, just awaiting a spark. Combine that with constant afternoon winds of 63-72kph and there's the makings of a wildfire. You'd never be able to outrun it if you found yourself downwind, and all it would take is a single spark. If it is too dry/dangerous, I eat my food cold and uncooked. Yuck, but far better than a tragic alternative. If it is not quite that bad, I'll take the stove over to the pavement or gravel of the road and cook there, on the shoulder.
Needless to say, I *
neverever
ever* cook in the tent or near it, where sparks could melt it or me in it. When I taught nursing management and wrote the curriculum for a school of nursing in the late 1980s, I was also a clinical rotation supervisor, assessing the nurse-managers on their rounds in the job. I saw waaaaay too many people who landed in the burn ward as a result of cooking in their tents. One really got to me: A young mother who would never be able to easily hold her children's hands 'cos nearly all her fingers were burned off. Her ear and most of an eyelid, too. Powerful disincentive for cooking in a tent.
Lessons to be learned, for sure.
Best,
Dan.
