Whenever possible or appropriate, I include some of the great stories I heard on the road. Today, our story is by Rick Blount.
In the afternoon I watched the storm approaching from my camp high in the Kingston Range at the south end of Death Valley. First, dark clouds gathered around the blackening mountains to my west. Then lightning began to spread horizontally, like irradiated fingers, across the desert basin below me.
It was dark by the time the storm hit my camp. I burritoed myself into my ground cloth under my tarp. But soon I began to worry about the fact that the Joshua tree I had hitched my tarp to was the tallest thing around on this moonscape. So I knelt in the nearby ravine, sleet accumulating in the folds of my jacket and on the ground around me.