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.
Humans seem to have a special mental gap when it comes to mountains. It’s warm and sunny so they go up in flip-flops and tiny short shorts, but on the actual mountain it’s freezing cold and often raining and they require rescuing because at some point they either fall over due to trying to wander around in what are essentially plastic slippers, or they’re too cold and they can’t carry on.
We know that the temperature drops as you go up and yet somehow that seems to fail to register for people.
As an American scout, it’s also been funny talking to my friends years after the kind of things you take for granted. I had a friend that took a bunch of people up a moderate hike, but they wound up in what could have very easily turned into a not moderate fuck up. I’ve never really considered myself a “survivalist”, but I was seriously in error in assuming people knew the basics.