Desert travel

WhitePawn

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I've poured over internet guides, but would be most interested to hear from anyone who has actually done some hardcore travel through the desert. Bonus points for insight into long-term living.

My main issue with the "survival guides" is all the talk of GPS and vehicle maintenance. Sword&Sorcery worlds don't have any use for car prep/maintenance and most other modern advice.

Any personal accounts can only help :)
 

robjvargas

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Not long term experience. A day.

Water MATTERS. I found it that even though "dry heat" doesn't feel oppressive like humid heat, it sucks the water from your body.

So, two things I took from that. Some kind of covering that slows the loss of water. And travel at night to minimize the need to lose water (i.e. sweat).
 

snafu1056

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It helps to have a guide. Someone who knows where there's water and grass for animals. You'd also need animals suited to the environment and protection from the sun, wind, and dust.

It also depends on the type of desert youre in. Not every desert is hot year-round. Some get pretty cold in winter. Sunny, but cold. So its possible that your desert dwellers might have more to worry about from the freezing wind than the blazing sun.

Landscapes can also vary in some deserts. In addition to the traditional sand dunes you might also have vast gravel plains, marshes, and salt flats. Desert lakes can often get pretty salty too, so finding drinkable water might be doubly hard. Inhabited areas would be found on the outer edges of the desert. The deep interior is where you usually find the sandiest, least hospitable areas.

The desert winds can make weird sounds and mess with people too. Also the way the wind can whip dust around to create ghostly shapes. Deserts can be spooky places.
 
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Maryn

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I grew up in the Sonoran Desert, in a suburb of Phoenix, and spent my young adult years in Tucson. While I was largely in planned spaces with roads and AC, I did spend time in the desert on occasion.

If you're doing Swords and Sorcery desert-style, you can forget that sort of modern convenience. Here's a bit of info you may be able to use:
  • Eight or nine months a year, it's hot. Not uncomfortable, makes-you-sweat hot. So hot your face gets red and you get a headache just from being outside more than briefly. While the locals to acclimatize to a degree, about five months a year they hide from the heat whenever possible, doing outdoor tasks and activities very early or very late.
  • The dry air distorts distance to the eye. Plenty of tourists have required desert rescue teams' intervention after deciding to walk over to that nearby mountain that appears to be three miles away. It's twenty.
  • Buildings where humans live will be thick-walled with small windows, often near the roof line, to retain the night's coolness and release heat as it rises.
  • Shade is vital for humans, pets, and farm animals.
  • People may choose large hats with a level of ventilation--think straw cowboy hats or sombreros--and wear clothes made of thinly woven cloth rather than expose all to the sun. They'll go for light colors. Dark colors will sun fade with surprising speed anyway.
  • Manual labor is much slower in the heat. The number of stones a man can move or rows he can hoe will be way less than in more temperate climates.
  • Everybody will be tan. There will be actinic keratoses (rough spots like giant freckles) and other sun damage in areas exposed daily, ordinarily seen only in an aging population but occurring by the 20s if your characters are fair-skinned. There will be skin cancers. People will appear older than their age, since the sun adds to wrinkles and loss of collagen. Oh, and their hair will be damaged--dry, with lots of split ends.
  • Rudimentary cooling systems will involve fans moving air cooled by passing through a wet fibrous something--the basis of an evaporative "swamp" cooler. Children or slaves could use literal fans rather than electricity, of course.
  • Water is everything. People drink more because they're sweating it out. Animals need more. Grass and weeds don't get enough, so grazing animals need a huge amount of land to live. Gardens will need daily watering to produce food or flowers Nobody will have a grass yard.
  • You really can burn yourself on metal left in the sun. I've got the scars to prove it, although they're pretty faded now. You can also cook an egg on shiny metal.

Maryn, who prefers where she lives now
 

Hoplite

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I grew up in Saudi Arabia, and several of my friends were in the Boy Scouts and weekend camping trips were frequent for them. I assume though you're asking for in relation to medieval fantasy, not modern day.

Water MATTERS. I found it that even though "dry heat" doesn't feel oppressive like humid heat, it sucks the water from your body.

So, two things I took from that. Some kind of covering that slows the loss of water. And travel at night to minimize the need to lose water (i.e. sweat).

Very true. In Saudi (and other nations in the Arabian Peninsula) Bedouin tribes would guard and keep secret their wells in the land. Any trespassers could expect to get killed. The tribes also knew where the wells were (by map, constellations, landmarks, I don't honestly know how) and would travel to the next well along journeys, not in a straight line to their destination.

Where I lived we were never more than 50 miles from the Arabian/Persian Gulf, so it was hot and humid in the summer time. The interior is where it gets very dry. Traveling at night works, but I think typically the Bedouins would travel in the early morning hours while it was till cool and they had sunlight to see. They would throw up their tents for the hottest part of the day.

It helps to have a guide. Someone who knows where there's water and grass for animals. You'd also need animals suited to the environment and protection from the sun and dust.

It also depends on the type of desert youre in. Not every desert is hot year-round. Some get pretty cold in winter. Sunny, but cold. So its possible that your desert dwellers might have more to worry about from the freezing wind than the blazing sun.

Landscapes can also vary in some deserts. In addition to the traditional sand dunes you might also have vast gravel plains, marshes, and salt flats. Desert lakes can often get pretty salty too, so finding drinkable water might be doubly hard. Inhabited areas would be found on the outer edges of the desert. The deep interior is where you usually find the sandiest, least hospitable areas.

It does get very cold in the desert. With no cloud cover all the heat from the sand goes straight up, and it gets cold! During the winter it could be as low as upper 30s or lower 40s.

Landscapes varied quite a bit as well. You could have an oasis that would be full of reeds, grasses, trees, etc. and barren flat wastes right outside of it. Gravely hills (called 'jebels') were common, as were the typical sand dunes. Some regions had monster dunes that were several hundred feet tall from the ground.
 

Hoplite

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  • You really can burn yourself on metal left in the sun. I've got the scars to prove it, although they're pretty faded now. You can also cook an egg on shiny metal.

:D My friends and I used to play game. You could call it "Who can hold onto the black-painted metal pole the longest".
 

melindamusil

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Water MATTERS.

Many years ago, I spent some time in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. It is right on the border of the Sahara Desert - you could go to certain places on the north/east border of the city and see the stereotypical "rolling dunes of sand".

I was amused to discover that water is actually a major commodity. My host was a gentleman who had become moderately wealthy by importing and selling water.

If you went out during the day, you could easily buy water on the street. It was primarily sold in sealed plastic pouches. You would tear off one corner of the plastic with your teeth, then you could suck the water like a straw. Western-style water bottles were really only sold in the restaurants that catered to tourists.

Speaking of dry heat - the climate was so dry that I would get a nosebleed around 8pm every night. My friends started joking about my nose being as reliable as a clock.

As was mentioned above, we pretty much stayed indoors during the day. Evening/night was when the city really came alive. Most of the restaurants would be closed during the day but would set up tables at night on the street. It was almost a nocturnal existence.
 

Maryn

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Oh, right, nosebleeds and sinus problems much, much worse where the air is so dry. My nose likes New York.

Yuma, Arizona also has rolling dunes.
 

Siri Kirpal

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Sat Nam! (Literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Headaches due to glare. Visors and sunglasses a must!

It's easy to figure out how the burka developed. Dust in the eyes can be a real problem.

And everything everyone else has said.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal
 

WhitePawn

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Thanks guys.

One last question. Sounds like the most serious random element type danger is "flash flooding". Also sounds like an excellent kill your darling scenario to keep in the stable. What desert noob wouldn't walk the smooth "track" instead of the more difficult (safer) terrain?

Any added knowledge on desert flash flooding?
 

MaryMumsy

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No personal experience with the flash flooding per se.

When I was a kid we would visit relatives in a small desert town in southern AZ. A common activity was a cook-out/picnic in a dry wash. The rule that was always drummed into us was: if you can see the lightning or hear the thunder, get your ass out of the wash. The actual rain can be falling miles away, and flood you within minutes.

MM
 

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Actually dehydration is the biggest elemental danger. And there are plenty of animals that can kill you, too, or make you seriously hurt: Mountain lions, poisonous snakes, spiders and scorpions, javelinas. Of course, that's the US southwest. But lightning is also a threat since there's very little cover, monsoons, sandstorms and yep, you don't want to be anywhere near a dry wash (empty riverbed) when rain is coming. They go from dry to torrential rapids in minutes. People die regularly that way in the southwest, or because they drive through water-covered low spots in a usually-dry road and underestimated the current or depth.
 
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snafu1056

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I think the flash flooding comes from the sudden violent storms that can spring up, usually in the late summer or early spring. Not sure when the biggest threat is. I think (I may be wrong) you can even get flash hail storms at certain times of the year.
 
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Quickbread

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In the Southwest, monsoon season is mid-summer through early fall. There are a lot of quick and violent storms during that time. One monsoon ripped off the open casement windows in my dining room and flooded the room with about an inch of rain. Then five minutes later, the sun was shining.
 

Los Pollos Hermanos

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I've done the tourist thing in Death Valley (my favourite place on Earth) four times now. By the end of the day I sweated out that much salt my skin felt powdery. Plenty of water, Gatorade, Pringles and sweet biccies/cookies kept me topped up though. Last time it went from 119F/48.5C to 66F/19C within a couple of hours when the rain rolled in - I've only seen torrential rain like that once before and that was 10,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies! Rivers suddenly appeared beside the road, visibility was poor and it felt really cold after such intense heat.

I've also been to Phoenix twice - the hot dry air and relentless (necessary) AC gave me rather impressive nosebleeds on the first visit. I'd discovered the relief provided by ramming vaseline up my snout by the second visit last summer (115F/46C = lovely and roasty = typical English mentality).
 

MissAimee

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Monsoon season starts around the beginning of July (around the 4th of July) to about mid September. It doesn't rain every day, lately it's been raining in the early to late evening.
I'm in the south eastern part of Arizona and we sometimes get more rain then Tucson (but some how this year Tucson had more storms then we did.) Arizona is known for lightening and thunder can be heard for hours before it actually rains. Flys are the worst when the rain comes.
 

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Apparently, heat to desert dwellers is relative.

A few years ago in mid-July, we were driving south on I-17 in Arizona. I stopped for gas about an hour north of Phoenix, and as I got out of the car, I noticed the car thermometer read 110°. I went in the store to pay for the gas and the lady asked me where we were headed.

"Phoenix," I told her.
"Oh man," she said, shaking her head. "It's HOT there."

Later that evening after checking into our motel in Phoenix, we noticed off to the south, a huge dark cloud, which turned out to be an enormous dust storm. That was quite an experience, watching that huge storm approach and engulf the city.

For non-desert people like us, at home, wind usually cools things down. The winds in the dust storm were like a blast furnace - hot, dry, and painful when it hits bare skin with tiny dirt and rock particles.
 

Helix

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Might be worth having a look at Robyn Davidson's book 'Tracks', which is an account of her solo trek across almost 3,000 km of desert in central and Western Australia. She did this in the late 1970s, when there weren't so many opportunities for back up as there are now.
 

Reziac

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DesertUSA has numerous videos, mostly from the Mojave Desert, and articles about safe desert travel. You can determine what's unsafe from that... just do the opposite! :eek:

I've done the tourist thing in Death Valley (my favourite place on Earth) four times now. By the end of the day I sweated out that much salt my skin felt powdery. Plenty of water, Gatorade, Pringles and sweet biccies/cookies kept me topped up though.

I lived in the western Mojave, about two hours from Death Valley, for 28 years. Didn't do a lot of travel but I did work outdoors. And yes, SALT. Salt is probably the single item most often neglected by the inexperienced. If you don't replace that salt you sweat out, you soon become dizzy, headachy, nauseous, and eventually dead. The flavor packets from ramen make a wonderful salt replacer you can carry in your pocket (apparently they contain enough other needfuls, like potassium, as they work better than plain salt). If you lick your arm and it tastes good, you need salt. (And if nothing else is available, DO lick that salt off your skin. It helps.)

I've also been to Phoenix twice - the hot dry air and relentless (necessary) AC gave me rather impressive nosebleeds on the first visit. I'd discovered the relief provided by ramming vaseline up my snout by the second visit last summer (115F/46C = lovely and roasty = typical English mentality).

The other issue is Raisin Eyes in the morning, which is amazingly painful. So... vaseline in the eyes, religiously every night, or you'd be sorry! And sleep with your head under the covers, so you're breathing moist air. All hail the swamp cooler, which is basically a big humidifier with a fan!

Running the car's air conditioning at such temps, especially under load (like on a long hill) is liable to overheat the motor. So you don't use it. Instead you soak a T-shirt or a towel, wear that, and roll down the windows.

Apparently, heat to desert dwellers is relative.

One day I'd been working outside all day, mostly pulling weeds (I cleared 10 acres by hand) and as I wander off to some new task I'm thinking, "What a nice day!" Then I happened to notice my thermometer... 117F degrees. Yep, it's relative. (Couple days later it hit 122F. :eek:)

The winds in the dust storm were like a blast furnace - hot, dry, and painful when it hits bare skin with tiny dirt and rock particles.

That depends where you are. In the Mojave you want wind, it keeps things tolerable. (And usually we got it. We didn't consider it "windy" til it got over 40mph.) But up by Reno it's cooler out of the wind.

As to dust storms, it's not just dust. Near Palm Springs I've seen the wind fling rocks the size of pea gravel -- they'll chip the paint off your car and seriously pit your windshield (which makes it glare if you're driving toward the sun). I don't think I'd want to be walking around in that!
 

Los Pollos Hermanos

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I'd read about keeping your electrolytes topped up in addition to your water levels, hence the Gatorade, pringles and sweet biccies/cookies. I also made sure I ate a proper meal when I got back to where I was staying (thrice Las Vegas, once Lake Tahoe), even if I wasn't particularly hungry (which is not like me!). I did try the licking your arm thing when there was nobody else around later and it tasted salty to the point of being disgusting (I don't add salt to food, so am quite sensitive to salty tastes). I also had some rehydration sachets just in case, but they're still in my little road trippin' first aid kit. I love the desert around there as it's such a sharp contrast to where I live - which at present is wholeheartedly embracing its cold and rainy stereotype!

I never suffered from eye problems in Phoenix, just the nosebleeds. My hair loves the desert - it gets straightened in the morning and stays straight. Sounds vain but, when you're used to the frizz halo, poker straight hair all day is a real treat.

Am quite jealous of your 122F - that's 50C and is a Death Valley badge of honour for us English types. ;) Looks like I'll have to go back sometime and resume my mission!

A dust storm is definitely not on my bucket list. I've read about them and that's enough for me. Do they cause breathing difficulties in those with lung conditions?

I'd been warned about that looooong uphill drag on I-15 north of the Inland Empire heading towards Nevada, so when I had to drive up it (at 8am and it was only 20C/68F) I made sure the AC was off. My rental car (a Nissan Rogue, which had replaced a dodgy Dodge) was absolutely fine, but I saw lots of overheated vehicles at the side - including some quite new ones. The opposite side is pretty fraught to drive down, btw!

Another little question (sorry for the tiny hijack): Why is it cooler OUT of the wind in Reno? Part of my story is set in the US and some of that is in Reno (to which I managed to squeeze in a two hour visit when I stayed at Tahoe). Admittedly the Reno parts are mostly inside offices, but I could include a character complaining about the wind making things worse - how and why is it worse? I didn't notice, apart from the fact it was about 12C/22F hotter down in Reno.

Cheers,

LPH.
 
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Reziac

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I'd read about keeping your electrolytes topped up in addition to your water levels, hence the Gatorade, pringles and sweet biccies/cookies.

Gatorade is, in my experience, really not very good compared to plain water plus salt. Gatorade makes you temporarily feel better, but it also makes you pee a lot more than you would otherwise, which means you're losing water. I've reached the conclusion that Gatorade is formulated to make you drink more Gatorade, not to keep you properly hydrated and electrolyted (new verb).

Beer is somewhat better at restoring electrolyte balance, but only about 4 ounces of it for best effect.

Am quite jealous of your 122F - that's 50C and is a Death Valley badge of honour for us English types. ;) Looks like I'll have to go back sometime and resume my mission!

Once the desert gets you, it never lets you go :D Seriously, once you become a desert rat, you're always a desert rat, even if you move to Alaska. (Or in my case, back to Montana. I miss the desert.)

A dust storm is definitely not on my bucket list. I've read about them and that's enough for me. Do they cause breathing difficulties in those with lung conditions?

I'd imagine so, tho I never encountered that. I did run into a few people who couldn't handle the lack of humidity. And people who say they've lived where it's not humid... compared to desert dryness, you ain't SEEN dry. This is spit-and-it-doesn't-hit-the-ground dry. Put your clothes on straight from the washing machine and they're bone-dry in 10 minutes.

I'd been warned about that looooong uphill drag on I-15 north of the Inland Empire heading towards Nevada

People who've never been to California don't realise how lumpy it is. Outside of the Central Valley, there's a mountain pass between Anywhere and Anywhere Else. The same applies to the desert, which has a lot of extremes of elevation both up and down. Death Valley is so spectacular not because it's below sea level, but because to get there, you come down several thousand feet in just a few miles. And then you have to climb back up to get out.

When travelling in the desert, a very good rule is "Never drive down into some low spot unless you're SURE you can get back out. Cuz you'd be amazed how often you can go down very easily, but the edge crumbles under you as you try to climb out, and you can't make it back up. (This can happen on foot, too.)

Another good rule is "Never drive anywhere you can't see existing tire tracks". That smooth dry stretch ahead of you, with few rocks and not a track on it? It may be deep dust, in which you WILL sink, and the only way back out is to hope someone comes along with a winch and a long cable (you probably can't walk in it either). And same when it's wet, except then it's sticky as well as bottomless. (Meaning "you can't reach a hard bottom you can drive on", not "there ain't one".)

And another good rule is ... bring extra spare tires. The desert is full of nails. It's our major cash crop.

Another little question (sorry for the tiny hijack): Why is it cooler OUT of the wind in Reno?

I don't know. I played with the effect for a while when I drove through there once, and never figured it out. This was over 30 years ago, and if I vaguely recall correctly, the wind was coming off the desert, which is not usual (the prevailing wind is from the west, which at least in the Mojave, brings marked afternoon cooling).

I've noticed it in Winnemucca too (tho the effect was not nearly as obvious) but not around Walker Lake or Las Vegas (all places I've been through a lot in the last couple years, mostly during the height of summer).
 
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robjvargas

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Thanks guys.

One last question. Sounds like the most serious random element type danger is "flash flooding". Also sounds like an excellent kill your darling scenario to keep in the stable. What desert noob wouldn't walk the smooth "track" instead of the more difficult (safer) terrain?

Any added knowledge on desert flash flooding?

Flash flooding can happen without warning. Many deserts I've seen are low points to the terrain around them. It can be sunny where you are, the rain happens 20 miles away, and whoosh. You never saw a drop of rain, but now you're in a flash flood.
 

Reziac

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Thanks guys.

One last question. Sounds like the most serious random element type danger is "flash flooding". Also sounds like an excellent kill your darling scenario to keep in the stable. What desert noob wouldn't walk the smooth "track" instead of the more difficult (safer) terrain?

Any added knowledge on desert flash flooding?

Don't camp down in a wash. Camp on a hill. Problem solved no matter how many flash floods come your way. They're not common (no more so than rain in the desert uplands), but you can pretty much tell where you're at risk by the terrain. It will show the effects of fast-moving water quite clearly. (In fact the term I'd use is "pretty damn obvious".) Either it'll be clearly water-scoured, or it'll be the low spot that's choked with vegetation.

And it's not like floods appear by magic; you do see it coming (at first as a trickle). The wash area is relatively narrow (the biggest one I know of is about 100 yards across at the base of the hills that feed it, but about 20 yards across where it goes under the road -- it's so big because it gets storms just off the ocean). If you're walking on the "smooth track" and it's not down in a canyon, you can easily just walk to the edge and step up and away from the water. Down in a canyon, you make sure you know the forecast before you go, cuz some of 'em the road is at the bottom between rock walls, and there's no way out.

People don't get in trouble just from walking down the wash. They get in trouble from camping there (which will also bring you rattlesnakes, scorpions, stink bugs, rats, jackrabbits, coyotes, bobcats, and whatever else comes seeking water at night) and getting caught asleep, or by trying to drive across a wash that's in spate: it's not the depth of the water that's the issue; it's that the sandy bottom is moving too, so even if there's not a lot of force in the water you've got no traction, and sometimes the rushing water eats a sinkhole in the sand, which in turn collects driftwood, stray cars, stupid people...

But that thing where people run straight ahead with whatever rumbling along behind 'em (floodwater, falling rocks, rolling logs, avalanche, brush fire, runaway trains, etc.) rather than just stepping aside and letting it pass? People DO that in Real Life. It sounds dumb but I've seen people (and animals) do it. It seems to be misdirected flight instinct, where instinct says the straight line away from the lethal threat is the best escape route. Ooops!!

Oh, desert brush fires. In a grassy area (which is how it gets if it's grazed regularly), you wait for the pathetically underfed fire to creep up to you, step over it, and wave it on its way (or go around stomping on it if you feel the urge; it won't get far anyway). But in an area with a lot of rabbitbrush or creosote bush, you get the botanical equivalent of an oil well on fire. You can't put it out, you can only contain it til it runs out of fuel, and it can move at the same speed as the wind.

I took this picture from the roof of my house, a bit more than half a mile away. The wind was blowing around 50mph and the chopper (which was dipping from the sewage treatment plant about 10 miles away) was having hell's own time aiming the water and not getting caught in the power lines. They wouldn't have bothered with the aerial stunts except there's a bunch of houses a couple miles downwind (the structures you can see are further away than they seem, almost two miles; the mountains are a good 15 miles off). At this point it had been burning for about half an hour. The big trees are elms. What's burning is mostly rabbitbrush (same as the lumps in the foreground) and saltcedar (a scrub tree), and a few creosote bushes which are making the black smoke. At this point the area hadn't been grazed in 3 or 4 years, and was getting weedy.

Oh, another point about our American deserts. They are FAR from lifeless... in fact they're about the most populated wilderness I've seen outside of a swamp, and everything living there is HUNGRY. Stand still for five minutes and something will eat you!! If the stink beetles don't getcha, the ground termites will. :eek:
 
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