According to a National Park Service news release, the 42-year-old Belgian tourist was taking a short walk Saturday in the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes in 123-degree heat when he either broke or lost his flip-flops, putting his feet into direct contact with the desert ground. The result: third-degree burns.
“The skin was melted off his foot,” said Death Valley National Park Service Ranger Gia Ponce. “The ground can be much hotter — 170, 180 [degrees]. Sometimes up into the 200 range.”
Unable to get out on his own and in extreme pain, the man and his family recruited other park visitors to help; together, the group carried him to the sand dunes parking lot, where park rangers assessed his injuries.
Though they wanted a helicopter to fly him out, helicopters can’t generate enough lift to fly in the heat-thinned air over the hottest parts of Death Valley, officials said. So park rangers summoned an ambulance that took him to higher ground, where it was a cooler 109 degrees and he could then be flown out.
the Mojave Rattler, Mojave Sidwinder Rattler, and Panamint Rattler all can be found there.
There’s other venomous snakes, too, on that list. It’s not a place you want to go about in sandals. not. at. all. There’s also plenty of nasty spiders and scorpions, too. (to be fair, there’s basically scorpions everywhere. except like. the artic)
Huh. There being scorpions everywhere except the Arctic is such a wild statement to your average European. Never have I ever seen a scorpion outside a terrarium despite having traveled and hiked extensively in various countries around the continent.
Are they truly that common in the Americas, even in more temperate climates?
They’re that common basically everywhere, actually.
The UK has yellow tailed scorpions from southern Europe; and with climate change spreading a lot. Northern Europe is still close enough to the artic to give them difficulties; but there’s other species that are smaller that are just hard to find.
There’s also tons of pseudoscorpids that lack the tail (and are tiny,)
Ah. Well, perhaps I ought to amend it to an average Northern European, then. There are definitely no true scorpions in the Nordics, although we probably have some tiny pseudoscorpids around somewhere. Although I’ve hiked all over Southern Spain and never spotted a scorpion there either.
…which probably says more about my perceptiveness or lack-there-of than anything else.
/edited for spelling
They’re pretty hard to see. Researchers go out at night with UV lights to make them glow in the dark. Otherwise they’re very sneaky.
They’re pretty much restricted to temperate though so nordics are definitely too cold.
But they’ll be coming for you soon, /sadlol
Interesting anecdote. I’m a European-American; members of my family and I have all seen scorpions in Spain, Italy, and especially Greece - all you need to do is stroll through a village at night. As for the US, I’ve never seen one outside a terrarium.
There is no desert in the America’s where there aren’t a bevy of things just itching to kill you. Every plant is covered in thorns, or spikes, or hairs with nanosharp needles (like prickly pear, that delicious sonuvabitch. Tip; beat the shit out it with dry grass to knock 95% of the needles off, you’ll never get it all tho).
The desert isn’t a climate where you take off clothes. If anything it means layer up; 1. To try and keep the heat off you (the sheiks are onto something over in the them middle easts) 2. To keep curious teeth from finding purchase and 3. To keep everything from slicing you the fuck open and getting poisoned/infection.
To play counter point tho, the upper Sonoran desert, so the middle and northern Arizona (not Phoenix/Tucson) is the easiest wilderness to live off of. I can walk out there with a canteen and be fine for forever. Almost everything is edible and waters scarce but you can almost always find it if you know how.
Before the white man came and old world disease cleared out the new world, the Salish Sea was one of humanities Eden’s. People just had to walk out to the shore, bend over and pick up a dozen families daily food in about 5 minutes. Oysters/mussels/clams/crabs/octopus everywhere. White man leveled the hills and buried the beaches, ending that, and clearing the populations away. About a million people have lived around Vancouver island/Puget sound for the past 200k years. For context, other cornucopia’s of effortless food were/are Bangladesh, Java, the Nile, Tigris/Euphrates, Chahokia, and the Indus valley. The Iroquois had an insanely dense population as well, with their capital being as large or larger than any European capital st the time.