Devil's Road 1
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

Perhaps no one captured the terror of the triple-digit desert heat more vividly than W.J. McGee in his early 20th century account "Desert Thirst as Disease." It is a harrowing description of McGee's discovery of the lost prospector Pablo Valencia along the Camino del Diablo-- or "Devil's Road"-- in southern Arizona. More than three quarters of a century later, it almost led to the undoing of another man who followed in Valencia's footsteps. Jeff Rice reports in this first of two stories.

The weather was unseasonably "cool" for August. It was a mere 103 degrees in a place where temperatures can rise to well above 120. Pablo Valencia struggled into camp after being lost for 6 1/2 days without food or water.

He walked. He crawled. He crept.. He tried to hug teddy bear cholla, he thought that they were crystal goblets of ice water...

Writer and scholar Bill Broyles first published McGee's account in the Journal of the Southwest.

"We soon found him deaf to all but loud sounds and so blind as to distinguish nothing save light and dark. The mucous membrane lining mouth and throat was shriveled, cracked and blackened. and his tongue shrunken to a mere bunch of blackened integument. Pablo was stark naked..."

BB: he was very emaciated. His eyes were shrunken. his blood where if he had been cut wouldn't flow and so he was on the verge of death. He'd even had a near death experience where he'd seen his soul rise out of his body and look around and tell him we've got to go on...

Miraculaously, Valencia did survive, and his story has become part of desert legend. More than seventy five years later, Bill Broyles set out to research this legend. He never would have guessed that he would end up fearing for his OWN life on the very same desert trail.

Tomorrow: Tracking Valencia's route. Bill Broyles gets much more than he bargained for. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. The program is supported by the National Science Foundation and Subaru.