‘Go camp out in the Alvord desert,’ they said. ‘It would be fun,’ they said.

After hearing rave reviews about the beauty and seclusion of the Alvord Desert, located in southwest Oregon, I went with a group of friends to see what all the fuss was about.

However, nothing was going to prepare me for the mix of beauty and horror we were about to experience in the next 24 hours.

Four hours due southeast will bring you to the vast, dry lakebed where the sky and the ground fuse together on the horizon and all sounds fall away. 

People come here with their motorcycles and ATVs to make use of the wide open space drawing their circles in the cracked surface. 

Plumes of dust danced on the lakebed where vehicles puttered across and drew cookies. 

Driving on it feels like being in a liminal car commercial because of the intense brightness and lack of any other detail besides the barren waste. 

The sprawling flat afforded complete privacy despite the lack of cover, making it so that you hardly see another person until you have to go to the shared bathroom on the rim. 

Wavy blips on the horizon were the only people we could see. The ideal social distance. 

During a furious sword fight featuring pool noodles, I parried a swing and my entire body shifted–but my knee didn’t. *Pop* went the aging 25-year-old joint in an unnatural twist and I went down. Any form of civilization, let alone a hospital, was at least three hours away.

Luckily, it popped back in and didn’t appear to be extremely damaged, so I used what substances were at my disposal to manage it for the time being. Never one to spoil a party, I moved on to the rest of the evening. 

The sunset illuminated some gigantic anvil clouds that loomed in every shade of pink, blue, yellow, orange and purple. Chicken wings were cooking on the grill under the puffy white mammoths when a sharp wind picked up and we were suddenly engulfed by our tent. 

Tent flaps wrapped around my neck and I had to hold them to keep the upward force from strangling me. The five us held onto that tent for dear life, which proved barely enough to keep it on the ground. 

If Jordan Peele’s Nope had come out prior to this, I would have entirely expected to look up and see Jean Jacket’s confusing beige mouth consuming us.

The chaos seemed to go on forever but lasted seconds and we looked around at the other campsites to find everyone else untouched. 

It seems that we just happened to be in the way of a wild dust devil that tore specifically through our camp. It felt personal. 

After driving a mile across the clay to collect pieces of our camp that were sent flying and finding hot chicken in our beds, we restored camp to the best of our ability before nightfall. 

I set up an air mattress in the back of my truck so that we could lay down and take advantage of the low light pollution. We saw everything there was to see in the night sky from the curdled edges of the milky way to the reliable passover of the ISS every 15 minutes. 

Two of our crew had over imbibed and so the pitch blackness was broken by the beautiful sounds of stomach-churning vomiting when the sky was suddenly lit up by five bright white dots. 

The fog of the midnight stupor was shattered by the realization that this was real.My entire body went cold while my eyes followed the mysterious orbs creeping laterally over the mountains.  

I genuinely believed that I was looking at a UFO for the first time, with a broken knee, drunk, limping between sick friends with water and wipes.

We could see everyone around us represented as tiny flashlight cones pointed frantically toward the westward sky. We heard confused shrieks and children crying in the distance. 

A rush of existential panic tore through each of us as the lights lingered in tandem and defied every explanation our inebriated minds could muster. 

Then I remember a news headline a few weeks ago about Starlink launches that appear quite a bit like UFOs. Once the message was across the various cognitive barriers we calmed down, but the adrenaline kept us up until the wee hours of the morning. 

Our parting gift from this place was a sublime sunrise of light orange, pink and yellow with little smears of puffy clouds spreading in mosaic across the whole sky–a stark difference from its broodiness the day before. 

We left with a strong sense of respect for the power of nature and how in an instant it can single you out and destroy your entire camp, cause you to break your knee, see a UFO and ruin your barbecue chicken.

I want to go back.