Feb 23rd Mountain time or Pacific time?

Imperial Sand Dunes Recreaction Area - Southern California

Thousands of Dune Buggies zipping all over the place like...bugs

Colorado River near Blythe, Ca

Wonderful life-giving water

Bureau of Land Management land camp site just over the border from Ca into Az

Our closest neighbor ...way in the distance

Fluffy white clouds

Our nearest neighbor - little desert lizard

Looking East from our camper

Quartz Heaven!!

Our nameless Guardian Angel (I called her The Lady in The Stones)

My Desert Quartz Labyrinth

Does it matter what time it is anyway?  Yes, of course it does.......sometimes.  Dentist appointments, etc., you need to be on time.....so you can wait!  We have been back and forth over the border from  Arizona to California, then  back to Arizona again,  (I think) but my phone keeps bouncing back and forth between Mountain Time and Pacific Time even when we are not moving!!  Thankfully, for us, at this point in our lives we do not have to be anywhere at any set time so it is a moot point.  But because I have been used to working and needing to punch a timeclock it becomes habit to always "know" what time it is.   It is getting a bit easier to let go of that need to know as I get into this retirement.  It is time to be thankful and grateful for the sunshine, for the water that we take for granted, for our friends, family, our animal companions, and most of all for our health.  It is time to get as healthy as we possibly can so we can get outside and appreciate the beauty that Nature has to show us.

We left California to come back to the Bureau of Land Management land for boondocking opportunities in the Quartzsite, AZ area.  In doing so, we crossed the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation area.  It was the strangest sight for me to see mountains and desert and suddenly in the near distance see nothing but a mountain of sand for miles and miles.  As we  entered the sand dunes all we could see zipping all over the place were hundreds and hundreds of dune buggies and other off road vehicles used to play in the sand!  I suppose that going to play in the dunes would be like us in the UP going snow mobiling  only a heck of a lot warmer!

We pulled into this campsite on Sunday after leaving Blythe, California near the Colorado River.  There are hundreds of campers here but because of the vast amount of land available to camp on you can find a spot with or without a view of others.    As we drove into this spot we saw a little grotto or memorial.  As you can see in the photo there is an angel in front of a green cross.  All around the ground are quartz rocks.  I am guessing that with each new camper to this spot a new rock gets placed along the border of the memorial.   I don't know if a camper's  pet died and was buried there or if someone just thought it was a good thing to do.  We have added more then a couple big pieces of Quartz to The Lady in the Stones. 

There are literally tons of quartz scattered throughout the hills and washes all around this area.  As I took my daily walk today I came upon an area that looked like someone had dumped a truck load of quartz in one spot.  I couldn't let all that beautiful stone just sit there so I gave it all a shape - a Labyrinth!

What time is it now?  Dinner time!!!!

Feb 16th On the move

First campsite on 16th - BLM land in California????

Awesome wash with flowering cactus and other plants

Should have picked these  up the first time I saw them.

Death and life in the desert

Palo Verde in the wash - full of bird nests!

We left our  boondocking campsite on Painted Rock Dam Road yesterday -  out of water and time to move on.  We have a Garmin GPS unit that up until  yesterday was working....well let's say in an acceptable manner for a machine that we have humanized, given a name " Garmie" and "she" has a British accent which at times can sound rather snooty!  Yesterday, she seemed to have lost her ability to navigate and continued to direct us to our route that we had programmed in three days before.  We could not get her,...I mean "it" to find the new route to Yuma.   After an hour of troubleshooting I figured out how to recalibrate the blasted unit and got "her" to do her job once again.   Thank goodness for paper maps!  We found our way onto the Interstate, and on the way to Yuma  filled up with water at an RV park that was owned by the gas station where we filled the camper with gas. 

It was late in the afternoon by the time we got back onto the road after getting supplies in Yuma.  We knew we would be passing a Casino just across the border of Arizona into California.  We decided to stop and check and see if that particular casino would allow RV's to park in their lot overnight.  As we drove up into the parking lot of the casino all we could see were RV's over 10 acres!  We looked at each other and said out loud "Yes, I guess they do allow RV's to camp overnight"!.  We pulled in next to the last one in a row, got level and set up camp for the night.   We walked into the casino and signed  up for their Player's Club and  collected our $10 for the slot machines.  I walked out with $43.50 from five minutes of hard work on the machine!  I think Richard came out with $3.50.  We took our winnings and walked back to the camper for dinner.  Once again it was not a quiet night in the parking lot.  Horns, sirens, generators, diesel motors, car alarms and barking dogs all added to the cacophony of sounds.  Since the casino paid us to stay with them we were not going to complain....too loudly.

This morning  we joined the caravan of campers headed out of the parking lot and turned our nose north to find another boondocking place that we had found on the maps.  We found it; it was beautiful....nestled up to the mountains, no one else in sight.  I immediately gathered up my rock hunting supplies, walking stick, cell phone, water and headed out of the camper to check out the rocks in the huge wash that we were parked near.  I wandered around, took some pictures, gathered several rocks and headed back to "home".  I set the rocks down just outside of the camper (mistake) and went inside just as a pickup with police lights pulled into our campsite.   We were told nicely that we were on Reservation land, not BLM (Bureau of Land Management Land) as we thought, and we were not allowed to camp there.  He said the site was too far away from emergency equipment if it was needed and there were drug smugglers and cougars!!  He told us of another spot that we were allowed to camp in - reservation land but we could get a permit to camp there.  The downside - I couldn't take the rocks I had set outside of the camper - "against the law to remove anything from Reservation land".  Poop!

We are now settled into our second campsite of the day - about five miles from the first; isolated, and there are rocks and hopefully no cougars!!!

Second campsite today (not too shabby)!

We are next to the irrigation canal (think Colorado River)

Another beautiful sunset

Out our back window tonight

Feb 13th - Silence is Golden

Patina (sun blackened) rocks

Desert landscape west of Gila Bend, AZ

A dry river bed (Wash) near campsite

Beauty in death - dead tree in wash

Saguaro Cactus near wash

  Boondocking camp site-west of Gila Bend, AZ

Desert landscape at base of mountain

Patina or "desert varnished" rocks

Tenacious life of a Teddy Bear Cholla cactus

Guardian Raven

Desert varnished (patina) rocks

As the title of this posting states:  Silence is Golden and so I leave you with the quiet and the beauty that is the desert on this Sunday evening.

PS - I need to show you the sunset we have been privileged to watch tonight: It doesn't get any better then this!!

Feb 12th - Into the Desert

Red Tailed Hawk before flight

Take off - No. 1 hawk

Enter second hawk

Mating or fighting?

Continuing to play?

There are shoe trees; bottle trees, bra trees......cup trees?

Catalina State Park, Tucson, Az

Thank goodness for road signs!

Even dead cacti are beautiful

Boondocking site - my dry river bed cairn

It has warmed up!  Finally! It seems we have been everywhere twice looking for warmth...wait....we have!  We left Organ Pipe Cactus Park just as the major freeze was over but we were low on propane gas for the rig and food for the humans.  We found gas in Why, AZ  just north of the park.  We discovered that we were very fortunate to find any at all.  Because of the cold snap (I use that phrase lightly because it was damn cold)  all the propane gas carriers were sold out and the business where we stopped that morning had just gotten her supply after being without for 3 days!  We continued north through Ajo, AZ and stopped for the night in a Casino parking lot south of Phoenix.  Once again we were given a token $10 and I came out with $15 on the slots.  We stayed long enough to see who won the Super Bowl and walked back to our motor home in bright, bright Dusk to Dawn lights!  The night sound effects were  wound up and playing loudly all through the night.  It was like being in the middle of a four lane highway with five overpasses woven over our heads.  Car alarms, horns, fire truck sirens, ambulances and, of course the frequent car driving by with the radio turned up to about 300 decibels complete with tummy rumbling bass.  It is an experience to "camp" in a casino parking lot. 

What a change now as I sit here soaking up the silence and warmth  in the desert just west of Gila Bend, Az - our second pass through this area. This time "we" decided to find this boondocking spot by checking out the DeLorme map program on the computer  looking for Bureau of Land Management - BLM land. We (you and I ) can camp free on this land.      We drove north out of Gila Bend, AZ.,  turned west onto a two track dirt road that had us pass by some of the lushest, greenest alfalfa fields I have ever seen.  Yup, right in the middle of the desert!  You have to know every chemical known to man and then some have been used to obtain  the florescent green glow that these fields emit. Just think, we eat the beef and pork that is fed this funky fodder.

   We continued on for about nine miles at about the same rate of speed as the distance we covered,  for an hour and a half to come out on  the road we were looking for!  We did it....our way.  We could have driven out of town on the blacktop and been in the same spot in oh, probably 5 minutes but we had an adventure!!! 

So here we are in this absolutely beautiful desert with not another human soul around for as far as the eye can see.  We are in  a 360 degree panorama of mountains, cactus, and lest I forget to mention.......rocks!

Feb 3 - Organ Pipe Cactus Memorial & Brrrrrrrrrr.....

Storm coming on way to National Park

Agave Cactus in storm

Outside of Bisbee, AZ (old copper, silver & lead mining town)

Ocotilla Cactus in National Park

The mighty Saguaro

 Organ Pipe Cactus

We are revisiting one of my favorite places - Organ Pipe Cactus Memorial National Park in the extreme southwestern part of Arizona - Also 4 miles from the border of Mexico.  Our drive here from Sierra Vista appeared to be the same as last year except for the Border Patrol signs we passed about 50 miles from the park.  One stated "Proceed at your own risk" - Another said - "Highly secured area".  Richard and I looked at each other, raised our eyebrows and wondered out loud -"What is that all about?"  We decided to call ahead to the park to make sure they had room for our camper.  "Come on in we have lots of room!"  was the answer.  Last year when we arrived the park was a bustling hum of activity- people out setting up camps; walking, visiting. It was also filled to about 80% of capacity.  This year it is stretching it to say it is 20% filled.  I would think the weather has something to do with the low numbers of campers as it has been unseasonably windy and cold with hard freeze warnings for last night and again for tonight.  However, we also learned that several of the longer hiking trails have been closed indefinitely because of the problems with security at the border.  Also the scenic 21 mile loop that we had planned on touring on our bikes has been closed by the Border Patrol.

 The above issue  is not  stopping either of us from braving the cold and getting out there and attempting to capture  with the camera,  the essence that is the southwestern desert.  (However, a slight flu bug has sidelined me but I hope to be back out there, bundled up with camera in hand by tomorrow).

  This park is so beautifully designed with plantings of several varieties of cactus placed around  each site. Even when the campsites are filled there is a feeling of openness and nature all around.  It is very sad to think that the drug cartels are causing these beautiful national parks that our taxes pay for to be slowly closed down and  areas made off limits because of the danger of the activities of the cartels.

Meanwhile back in the camper - Richard has stayed busy and warm making cookies a couple of days ago and bread today!!!  Yummy