My first dig in the Negev desert turned into a sandstorm nightmare

I was volunteering on a site near Beersheba last spring, working on a Bronze Age settlement trench. Everything was fine until a sudden wind kicked up around 2 PM. Within 10 minutes, we couldn't see more than 3 feet ahead. Our team lead yelled for everyone to cover the exposed squares with tarps, but I froze and lost my trowel in the sand. Ended up crawling on hands and knees to find it while grit got in every zipper and camera lens. We lost about 2 hours of work that day, and I still find sand in my gear bag months later. Has anyone else had a weather event totally wreck a field day?

3 comments

3 Comments

elliot_patel8d ago

Honestly I used to think people were OVERREACTING when they talked about losing gear to weather. That "lost my trowel in the sand" line hit me hard because I had the exact same thing happen during a sudden hailstorm in Jordan. I was so focused on covering the profiles I dropped my brush and it just disappeared into the mud. Spent 20 minutes scraping around with my fingers while ice pellets bounced off my helmet. Changed my whole attitude about keeping backup tools in a sealed container ever since. No joke I still find grit in my notebooks from that trip.

janarivera8d ago

Different storms, different heartbreaks I guess. A nice reminder that sometimes the site fights back harder than the trench does.

barbarah198d ago

Oh man, that "lost my trowel in the sand" bit from @elliot_patel really got me. I had a similar moment in New Mexico where I was so smug about my perfectly organized tool belt, then a dust devil came through and I spent an hour finding my trowel wedged between two rocks. Now I keep a backup trowel taped to the inside of my cooler like some kind of paranoid archaeologist. I guess the site really does fight back harder than we give it credit for sometimes.