47 Days in Extreme Heat, and You Begin to Notice Things

Aridity is baked into the people and places of the American Southwest. We possess a dry demeanor influenced by a landscape that is often cracked and weathered by wind, water and time. You see it in our faces and you feel it on the ground, but we hardly have a vocabulary for the extreme version of heat and drought we are now living through.

In Castle Valley, according to our town’s weather keeper, we have had 47 days this summer where the temperature exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter, and the average high was 107 degrees. At its peak the heat reached a sweltering 114 degrees. From Texas to Phoenix to the Four Corners, where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet, there has been no relief.

You notice things in sustained heat. Paying attention is a strategy for survival. Down by the Colorado River, the sand that is usually supple is now gray like concrete and as unyielding. My footprints leave no impression. Willows that border the river appear as tattered drapes, silver-green, hiding birds like yellow-breasted chats and summer warblers held hostage by the sun. The red rock landscape I love and have lived in for a quarter of a century is a blistering terrain. The heat bears down on our shoulders with the weight of a burning world.

We can hide from the heat in the desert in our air-conditioned homes, ours cooled by a heat pump powered by solar panels. But there is no place on Earth where we can escape the climate emergency for the duration. This is not being a doomer. This is dwelling with the facts that mirror our experience. A U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation report tells us the average temperatures in the Colorado River Basin are “projected to increase by five to six degrees Fahrenheit during the 21st century” and even more in the upper Colorado Basin, where Castle Valley sits. With climate change heightening extreme temperatures, drought, fires and floods, we find ourselves entangled in a cascade of consequences.

Farther south, our Diné (Navajo) neighbors who have lived with desert heat through the generations are installing solar panels on their homes for greater efficiency, though some have no electricity and running water at all. This can be life-threatening. Many throughout our desert communities are confronting the possibility that this untenable sustained heat and drought will force us to leave.