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Like Summer in Las Vegas.

While nothing could possibly seem more lame than writing an article about the weather, the fact is … it goes a long way toward setting the Las Vegas Valley apart from the rest of the nation.

With the exception of Phoenix, the climate in Las Vegas is unlike any major city in the USA.

Why do I bring this up today?

Because for the first time this year, we crossed the threshold of hell.

Triple digits plus double digits.

I don’t know what the “official” temperature is at the airport, but my indoor/outdoor thermometer hit 111 degrees in the shade.

It’s been incredibly mild so far this year, rarely breaking the century mark, but all good things come to an end.  From what I understand from the old, old timers – when things start off this slowly, we are in for three months of overt torture.  There’s no free lunch in Vegas.  You either pay now or pay later.

Of course, it’s also that time of year when one tourist after another comes through and says “I love this weather, it’s no problem for me.  It’s so much worse where I come from”.

Or –

“You guys have it easy.  We have heat plus humidity.  This is a dryyyyy heat.”

When people say this, I often fantasize about shoving them into an oven and locking the door.  Because that’s a dry heat too.

The reason I think that most tourists think that “it’s worse where they come from”, is because they fail to take one large factor into account.

Variability.

Yes, it may be hot and humid where you come from, but you also get respites.  You get frequent rain showers to break the monotony of heat waves, clouds roll in several times a week, and you also get relief in the form of nighttime.

No such variability exists in Las Vegas.  At some point during the year, a bright heat lamp is switched on, and it stays on.  And on.  And on.

For the next hundred days, there is blinding sun and triple digit temperatures.  It is relentless and unforgiving.  There is no rain, there are no clouds.  And nighttime?  It’s not much better.  It’s extremely common for 100 degree temperatures to still exist at midnight.  If we are lucky, we may hit 90 degrees by 5am, but it usually hovers around one hundred for three consecutive months.  The only variations we get are the ten degrees of flux between 105 and 115 degrees.

This is worse than where you come from.

I fully concede that our heat is entirely bearable for a week.  It is cute when you are on vacation, but after 20 days, the novelty fully wears off.

I’m not just speculating either.  I’ve lived elsewhere.  I’ve lived in DC, New York City, and Los Angeles.  LA has no weather to speak of, but back east it’s a different story.  I lived through a lot of 90+ degree weather with high humidity.  I was a bicycle messenger for many years.  When I say that I’ve been through the humid heat, I mean that I slashed through traffic and pedaled through it for 10 hours a day … all day … every day (if I wanted to get paid).  I averaged anywhere from fifty to a hundred miles.  Daily.

I am not a neophyte when it comes to humid heat.  I have probably been “exposed” to it far more than most people.

Having been through both kinds of summers in spades, I think I am in a position to offer a first-hand, educated opinion.

Vegas is worse.

If you think about it, I also have a staunch ally backing me up in this opinion.  Mother Freaking Nature. While plants and animals are abundant in the rest of the nation, almost nothing grows here.  It’s the desert.  Mother nature has flipped Las Vegas the bird and declared it off-limits to nearly all carbon-based life forms.

If humans were meant to live here, there would be vegetation and animal life.  However, if you drive the 95 from Las Vegas to Tonopah, it will quickly become apparent what grows here.  Not a damn thing.

Game, set, and match with regards to the weather argument.  If the human animal were meant to “love this heat”, then it would not have been a vast wasteland for a billion years.  I think the evidence speaks for itself.

This sounds like a “bash the tourist” thing, though, and that is very much not my intent.

The “the heat is not a big deal” phenomenon is not confined to tourists.  There exists a large amount of locals that claim to “love the heat” also.

I’ve finally figured these folks out.

Over the years, I’ve made an observation about such locals which is accurate 100% of the time.  Not ninety nine percent, but a hundred percent.  When something is always accurate, it graduates from stereotype to fact.

Vegas locals who claim to love the heat, spend little time in it.

Every, single, solitary Las Vegas resident I have met who claims to “love this heat” – drives everywhere.  Not a single one of these “heat lovers” has walked a full mile outdoors in the last ten years.  Hell, the only exercise they typically get at all is walking through the air-conditioned aisles of Walmart.  They “love the heat”, because they are in it for five minutes a day tops.  This is like claiming to love earthquakes … when you live in a hot air balloon above the San Andreas fault.

My neighbor is one of these people.  He “loves the summer heat”, yet every time I am in his home, I swear it feels like a meat freezer.  The thermostat is set to some ridiculously low number, he walks twelve feet to his air conditioned car in the morning, and works in a large, air conditioned casino.

The heat is easy to love when you’re not in it.  If all you do is waddle from one air conditioned space to another, you don’t experience it much.

Even at my advanced age, I still walk quite a bit.  Probably far more than the average Las Vegan.  I have yet to fully adopt the “drive everywhere” West Coast way of life.  I get quite a bit of exposure during the summer, and I dislike the heat very much.  I also hate the sun.  If it rained every day, that would be perfectly fine with me.

“Gee Rex, you picked the wrong place to live if you hate the heat and love the rain.  It’s your own damn fault.”

Yes, I get told this every year, and there is some validity to it … but not much.

I know a fair number of people that live in Chicago and love it … but despise the weather in January.  I know a large number of people from Seattle who love their city, but hate December through March because they never see the sun.  Florida is the 4th most populous state in the country, and the vast majority of Floridians hate hurricanes … yet every year, they have to dodge them.

There is really nowhere I could move, to avoid adverse conditions.  There is a weather price you must pay to live anywhere.  Sometimes a very high price.  Whether it’s people’s homes getting washed away during Key West thunderstorms or Malibu mudslides, a lot of great places to live are patently unlivable for certain portions of the year.

Perhaps LA or San Diego, but let’s face it, while a hundred straight days of triple digit heat is difficult, living amongst Californians year round would be downright oppressive.

There, I managed to piss off the two most populous states in the USA on two consecutive days.  And I have the audacity to wonder why I get hate mail.

Las Vegas weather is truly unbearable for only about one quarter of the year, and this is not enough to negate the other positive aspects about living in the city.

It would be entirely accurate to say that the weather is that which I like the least about Las Vegas.  If they could move the city to Western Washington State, it would be marvelous.

When summer rolls around in Vegas, I am also constantly given the completely useless advice to “drink water”.  As if my natural thirst reflex is somehow broken for three months.  This is kind of like telling someone to “remember to pee”.  I drink water year-round, and I wish people would stop offering this imbecilic advice.  It does nothing to cool you down, it simply prevents you from dehydrating … the same way it does in winter.

Alas, I am on the precipice of the most torturous three months of my existence, and I am just going to make the best of it.  And year after year, I “make the best of it” in exactly the same way.  I anticipate that this year will be no different.

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