The Wind at Organ Pipe: Big Bertha vs. Mother Nature Round 2

by

Three weeks after the Devil’s Canyon roof incident, Lucy and I were feeling confident. We’d fixed a leak ourselves, survived multiple thunderstorms, and even managed to not get divorced while backing Big Bertha into increasingly tight campground spots. We were RV experts now.

We rolled into Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern Arizona on a Tuesday afternoon. The temperature was 104 degrees, which sounds insane but actually felt fine as long as you weren’t, you know, moving or breathing heavily. The kind of heat where your phone gives you a warning when you try to use it outside.

“Site 23,” I said, checking our reservation. “Full hookups, shade ramada, and… oh perfect, it says ‘protected from wind.’”

Lucy looked at the weather app. “Winds 5-10 mph. We’re good.”

The site was actually great—concrete pad, our own shade structure that probably hadn’t been cleaned since the Clinton administration, and a view of these incredible rock formations in the distance. Cost: $35 a night, which felt like a steal compared to Montana’s $85. I got Big Bertha leveled on the first try, which almost never happens, so I was feeling smug.

Lucy set up our outdoor space while I connected the shore power and water. She’d just pulled out our new 20×20 foot awning—yeah, we upgraded after Devil’s Canyon because we figured if we were spending this much time outside, we might as well not get cooked by the sun. Hit the button, and the electric motor hummed to life. The awning rolled out smooth as butter, giving us a nice shaded area next to Big Bertha.

“I love this thing,” Lucy said, arranging our camping chairs underneath. “Best $800 we’ve spent.”

I grabbed a couple of cold ones from the fridge—because nothing says “desert camping” like a beer at 4 PM when it’s 104 outside—and we settled into our chairs. We’d picked up a cheap battery-powered camping fan from Amazon before leaving Montana, and that little $25 miracle was pumping out enough air to make the heat almost bearable.

—

Around 6 PM, the temperature dropped to a pleasant 98 degrees, so we fired up the grill. Tonight’s menu: burgers with all the fixings, because we’d learned our lesson about trying to cook anything complicated in extreme heat. Lucy made a simple salad with iceberg lettuce (because that’s the only lettuce that doesn’t wilt instantly in Arizona), tomatoes, and whatever dressing we had in the fridge. Fancy.

The sunset was absolutely killer. Those rock formations turned pink, then orange, then this deep purple that made the whole landscape look like a sci-fi movie set. I was taking photos with my phone, knowing full well they’d look nothing like the real thing, when Lucy pointed at the horizon.

“Is that dust?”

I looked where she was pointing. There was a brown haze rolling across the desert toward us, maybe a mile or two out.

“Huh,” I said, with all the wisdom of someone who grew up in Ohio and had never seen a dust storm in his life. “That’s interesting.”

The couple in the site next to us—Karen and Mike from Phoenix, who’d been coming to Organ Pipe for twenty years—started frantically pulling in their outdoor furniture.

“You might want to get everything inside!” Karen yelled over. “Dust storm coming, and it looks like a big one!”

“How fast does it—” I started to ask, but Mike cut me off.

&#8220"Fast! Right now fast!"#8221;

Lucy and I scrambled. We grabbed the camping chairs, the grill (still hot, which was fun), the table, our drinks, everything. I was heading back to hit the button to retract the awning when the wind hit.

And I mean HIT.

One second it was calm. The next second, it felt like someone had turned on a giant fan set to “hurricane.” The wind went from maybe 10 mph to what I later learned was 50+ mph in about thirty seconds. Dust filled the air so thick you could barely see Big Bertha twenty feet away.

I ran to the awning control, smashed the retract button, and… nothing. The motor hummed, but the awning wasn’t moving. The wind had caught it like a sail, and the motor wasn’t strong enough to pull it back in against that much force.

“It’s not retracting!” I yelled to Lucy, who was already inside with the door cracked open.

“Get in here!” she screamed back.

“The awning’s going to rip off!”

I could see the metal arms starting to bend. Our brand-new, $800, three-week-old awning was about to become a very expensive piece of Arizona tumbleweed.

—

I dove into Big Bertha’s basement storage and started throwing things around, looking for anything useful. The wind was howling outside like a freight train, and I could hear the awning fabric snapping and popping. Finally, I found what I needed—a bundle of heavy-duty ratchet straps we’d bought for securing stuff during travel, and a heavy-duty LED headlamp because there was no way I was doing this without hands-free light.

“What are you doing?” Lucy asked as I strapped on the headlamp.

“Probably something stupid!”

I grabbed the straps and ran back outside. The dust was so thick I could taste it—gritty and nasty. My headlamp barely penetrated the brown haze, but it was better than nothing. I couldn’t see more than ten feet in any direction.

The awning was flapping violently, the metal arms bowing out at angles they definitely weren’t designed for. I had maybe minutes before the whole thing ripped off and either took out our slide-out or became some cactus’s new roof.

I wrapped the first ratchet strap around the awning arm and pulled it down, trying to reduce the surface area catching the wind. Then I hooked it to Big Bertha’s frame and cranked the ratchet as tight as I could. The arm bent down about two feet, and the fabric stopped flapping quite so violently. Good, but not enough.

I did the same thing on the other side, working fast because the wind was literally pushing me around. Got the second strap secured and cranked tight. The awning was now pulled down into more of a V-shape, and the flapping reduced by about half.

But it still wasn’t fully secured. I needed something else.

That’s when I remembered the bungee cords—heavy-duty ones with carabiner clips that we’d picked up at Harbor Freight for like twelve bucks. They were still in the basement storage. I ran back (well, stumbled back through the wind and dust), grabbed the whole pack of them, and got back to work.

I clipped bungees to every point I could reach, connecting the awning fabric to the arms, the arms to the frame, anything to anything that made sense. It looked ridiculous—like Big Bertha was wearing a very aggressive sports bra—but it was working. The awning stopped trying to achieve flight.

I stood there for a second, breathing hard, covered in dust from head to toe, and realized I probably looked like a Star Wars character who’d been through a bad day on Tatooine.

—

The dust storm lasted about forty-five minutes, which felt like four hours. When it finally calmed down, everything—and I mean everything—was covered in a fine layer of brown dust. Big Bertha looked like she’d been dipped in chocolate powder.

Lucy opened the door. “You’re alive!”

“Barely,” I said, spitting out dust. “But the awning’s still attached.”

We went outside to survey the damage. The awning was still there, held down by my frankly impressive web of straps and bungees. The motor housing looked fine, but when I hit the retract button, it made a grinding sound and stopped.

“Well, that’s not good,” I said.

The next morning, after cleaning dust out of places I didn’t even know Big Bertha had, I climbed up on a stepladder to inspect the awning motor. Turned out, dust had gotten into the motor housing and gummed up the works. Not a huge deal, but it meant manually rolling the awning in and out until we could get it serviced.

Karen and Mike came over around 9 AM with coffee—the good stuff, not the instant garbage we’d been drinking.

“That was some quick thinking last night,” Mike said. “Saw you out there wrestling that awning. Thought you were crazy at first, but it worked.”

“I was definitely crazy,” I admitted. “But I just spent $800 on that awning three weeks ago. Wasn’t about to let Mother Nature have it.”

Karen laughed. “Welcome to Arizona. Dust storms, heat, and monsoons. It’s like RVing on hard mode.”

They gave us some tips about desert camping—like always having straps ready for wind, keeping air filters clean, and never trusting weather apps in the desert because conditions can change faster than your phone can update.

That afternoon, I ordered a can of compressed air on Amazon for cleaning out the motor housing (should arrive in two days at the campground office), and we picked up some awning repair tape at the visitor center gift shop because the fabric had a few small tears from the wind. Nothing major, but better to patch them now than wait for them to get worse.

—

Three days later, we were sitting under our now-functioning awning (thanks to compressed air and some patient mechanical work), watching another sunset, when Lucy said, “You know what? I’m kind of proud of us.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Roof leak, dust storm, probably some other disaster waiting around the corner… but we keep figuring it out.”

I raised my beer. “To figuring it out.”

“And to buying way more straps than we think we need,” she added.

“And to $25 battery-powered fans that make 104 degrees almost tolerable.”

We clinked bottles and sat there in the evening heat, Big Bertha behind us with her new battle scars—a patched roof from Montana and an awning that had survived a legitimate dust storm.

The couple across from us had just pulled in with a brand-new Class A motorhome—one of those $400,000 jobs that looks like a luxury bus. They were setting up, looking fresh and confident.

“Think we should warn them about the dust storms?” Lucy asked.

“Nah,” I said. “They’ll figure it out.”

Because that’s the thing about RV life. You can watch all the YouTube videos and read all the blogs, but eventually, you just have to live through your own disasters and figure out your own solutions. Sometimes with ratchet straps and bungees and a headlamp, sometimes with microfiber towels and roofing tape.

But you figure it out. The disasters make better stories than when everything goes perfectly.

The Essentials That Saved Our Bacon (Round 2)

The Products That Made the Difference:

Sometimes the difference between an expensive repair and a good story is having the right supplies and being willing to do something slightly crazy.