Actually I've no idea whether or not this ‘road construction next 5 miles' tag is accurate or not. It's often hard to tell distance in the desert, particularly on these hazy days.
This is kind of the reverse of my road construction experience in the US and the UK. Readers in the UK will recognize the traffic cone. For readers in the US, this is the UK equivalent of the orange traffic barrel.
In my driving career in the UK and the US, particularly the M4 and M25 in the UK and I-10 between Houston and new orleans in the US, I'm more used to seeing hundreds of cones/barrels marking off miles and miles of road construction with not a soul to be seen. Here there's miles of work, a bulldozer in play, the ‘dozer operator's spotter yet only a single cone.
The cone didn't actually serve a safety purpose here. We used them to keep ranging rods upright in this rocky terrain where we couldn't easily stick them into the surface. In this case it's marking the location where we wanted the escapement access cut.
The light grey in the cut ahead of the bulldozer is a mud stone that can also be seen exposed on the edge of the water course just to the right of it. That the tracks extend way across the plain into the distance suggests to me we might also have knocked the tops off some of the distant sand dunes, hidden in the haze where the desert meets the sky.
I've spent hours flying over this general area in Google Earth but I don't see these scars anymore. In the intervening 20 years or so, the wind has covered our tracks. Though I'm sure if I were there on the ground today they'd be pretty obvious to me once more.
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