One Saturday morning, I decided to walk to the town of 29 Palms from the base. It looked like it was not that far away and actually closer if I walked across the desert instead of following the road.
Well things in the desert are much further away than they appear. I walked for several hours to get there and I was probably the thirstiest I ever was in my life up to that point. All I did the rest of the day was drink fluids to rehydrate myself and I had a mild case of sun stroke. Another few miles would have done me in for sure and I was just 18 and in the best shape of my life.
I took the bus back to the base!
“I was stationed on 29 Palms, CA after boot camp for additional training.”
We had to fly a package into 29 Palms in the middle of summer. Opening the aircraft door was like opening the door of a blast furnace.
HOT!!!
That’s an unforgettable experience.
Thank God you lived to tell about it.
Yes. Distance is hard to judge in such areas. I got tricked in Tuscon, Arizona decades ago. I didn’t stay with it as long as you did though.
I just thought “Never mind”, and did a U Turn back to my friends house.
On one rotation to Fort Irwin/NTC, I remember cresting a hill in my HMMWV and seeing the Goldstone Radio Antenna across (what I thought was) a small open valley. I looked at my map and it was just shy of 10km from where I was.
I think the aridity has a lot to do with it. Italian Renaissance painters mastered a technique of atmospheric perspective they called sfumato. Where most people live (i.e. not deserts) humidity, pollen and other particulates in the air create a haze that our eyes and brains subconsciously read as distance. It's why in most places hills become bluer or grayer as they recede into the distance.
In the desert, there's virtually no humidity. There's an absolute minimum of pollen or grains floating in the air. When the wind is calm there's very little dust. The air is unusually clear for people not used to it, and visually it contributes to distant objects looking significantly closer than they are.