Camping – Page 3 – TooBusyForWork

Sisters, OR

We had been to Sisters before, but not during quilt week. Wow, is it busy! Here is the fabulous boondock site we found though.

Maybe a half mile from the high school where the classes were held.

My first class on Monday was on quilting with lines. We started with straight lines, then slightly curved lines, then very curved lines, then … I guess you get the idea. I enjoyed the class a lot. It was well organized. My second class was on Tuesday and was for piecing. We used a kit that had a beautifully printed panel showing the Sisters Quilt Show design for this year. The kit also had fabric for lovely little star blocks which is what we really worked on. It used a “Tri Recs” ruler, and what seamed simple was actually pretty slow at the start! I finally got a rhythm established and could do a star in about 25 minutes, having pre-cut all the pieces. My brain was so exhausted by 2:30 on Tuesday I had Kevin come to pick me up early! Recommendation: Plan on having a day to recover between classes. They are so chock full of information it is exhausting!

The kit fabrics are gorgeous. The blocks (unpressed in this photo) are 6 1/2”, so each of this little star points are tiny! And they definitely have a right and left side.

Wednesday and Thursday we just did errands and had friends out for lunch which was great fun (the friends, not the errands!). On Friday we drove the McKenzie Scienic Byway. Absolute stunner, but definitely for the truck, not them motorhome. Lots of ups and down, lots of tight curves. The size limit is 35’, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that size limit to drive it! Here are some pictures from our drive with captions.

Lots and lots of lava! Under these boulders is a solid river of lava

The lichen was a brilliant green. Excuse the picture quality.

This is the old Santiam Pass Toll Road. Can you imagine traversing the lava fields in a wagon?

This small “windows” highlight various points of interest

One of the highlights was the historic Fish Lake Remount Station. It has a long and storied history of many uses, the longest was as a Forest Service muleskinner location. Mules were the primary way to get goods into and out of the remote locations where rangers were stationed. The site was also the summer quarters for the Head Forest Ranger for a number of years. Some of the buildings are maintained by the “Friends of Fish Lake” organization including the one below.

“Caulked boots” means boots with spikes for foresters/loggers climbing trees

Even the old dinner ware was marked with the Forest Service logo.

We had lunch at Clear Lake Resort operated by a USFS concessionaire. The food was good, and the lake was very popular. It is not the headwaters of the McKenzie River after a lava eruption damed the ancestral McKenzie. Deep and cold.

On Saturday we went to the legendary Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show. We got downtown by about 7:30, and quilts were still being hung. There were over a thousand! We wandered around a couple of hours and saw hundreds before it started getting too hot for us. But wow, what a show! This is just a small sampling

Very traditional postage stamp quilt (each block is 1”)

A young boy made this cute Highland cow quilt

The creator of this stunner was standing by the quilt as we came up.

And of course there were paper pieced beauties

At 9:30 as we left, people were just beginning to throng, and I am sure it quadrupled in size before it finished this afternoon.

And I would be totally remiss if I didn’t comment on the town of Sisters. What a lovely place! There are flowers everywhere, and it is a tourist town with beautiful flowers, decent parking, and very few tshirt shops! Instead there are nice little restaurants, art galleries, etc.

We have gotten tired of the heat in Sisters though, so after we went to the show for a few hours, we packed up and went 22 miles away to the Ray Benson Sno-Park. Basically there are just a few huge parking lots you can stay in. It might sound bad, but the temperatures are at least 10 degrees cooler than Sisters, and the view out my front door isn’t bad! There is no one else staying in the lot we are in, and the place is very quiet.

We will stay here until Monday morning when we head into an Elk’s Lodge in Tillamook. The weather there is nice and cool, and it will be a welcome relief.

RZR riding over the Independence Day holiday

We arrived in Crescent at the Big Pines RV Park. Nice place. It is older and obviously family run. The sites are spotless, nicely separated (for an RV park), and they have their own entrance to the UTV trails in the area! It was obvious who was here from the Central Oregon club, and we managed to connect with one of the group’s leaders easily. On the 4th, we went on a group ride to Ft. Rock and back. It was 115 miles (!!!) on mostly gravel roads ridden at pretty high speeds. We took a long lunch break at a bar and grill in town, and then a thunderstorm came in. We just put on ponchos to keep our legs dry and took off on a fast, more direct route to the campground. I only got a few pictures because my GoPro got knocked down and I didn’t notice it until we finished the trip! But here is the little bit I did get.

The first one shows what most of the roads were like – wide graded gravel with minimal bumps.

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And this is the result of passing too close to a tree! The GoPro stayed attached, but it decided to point straight up to the sky. Nice view of the clouds though LOL!

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While the club had nice people, it just isn’t our type of riding. We decided to head out on our own on Saturday. We ended up riding about 60 miles to the town of Odette and had lunch at Manley’s Restaurant. Very nice burgers! Here are some pictures along the way.

And then we got to this:

BTW, I have no idea why this video is in a totally different format than the others! But take a look at just how narrow the trail got to be. Good thing we had a narrow rig!

One of the interesting sites we saw on the way back was this cinder mine. Many of the roads in the National Forest are improved using this red cinder. There were lots of volcanic escarpments and lava flows in the area.

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We took off for Sisters, OR this morning. I had reserved a 50’ site at Cold Springs Campground (USFS), but when Kevin took the truck over to check it out, we couldn’t have gotten in the site due to trees on the entrance. Sigh. We found a boondock site even closer to town though, so I am not too worried. It is going to be in the mid-90s the first part of the week, so having the ability to turn on the generator as much as we want for AC is not a bad trade off.

This afternoon I picked up my credentials for the classes I will be taking this week, and we had dinner at a Himalayan restaurant called High Camp Taphouse. The food was well flavored, but I was expecting a bit spicier. We didn’t regret the stop though.

Tomorrow morning I start classes. We will be here until the Monday after the quilt show. We plan on visiting Bend for some truck work and shopping, plus we will do some riding a few days.

In Oregon

My post-surgery exam showed everything was good, so we headed out of Iowa on Wednesday morning. First night we stayed at Lake Manawa State Park just inside the Iowa border with Nebraska. It is an old oxbow lake with a pretty new campground we have stayed in before. Moderately priced with widely separated sites, it was a good overnight stop. Thursday night we stayed in the Cabela’s campground in Sydney, NE. It is still too hot to think about going without air conditioning! But by Friday early afternoon we were in Wyoming at the USFS Vedauwoo Recreation Area. This is another favorite spot, and we spent two nights there. We even got the same campsite we had two years ago. Here’s a video showing our site.

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Here is a video from the RZR showing what the dispersed camping area is like. Note this is the weekend before the Independence Day holiday, so it was already getting crowded.

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There were lots of flowers, but almost all of my pictures came out blurry. Obviously I wasn’t holding still well enough. I did get a nice picture of wild roses and a cute little ground squirrel that posed for me.

We drove through a number of areas that had been logged, and the resulting meadows were a riot of color. I wish my little iPhone could capture the colors better.

We crossed a little stream on one of our adventures, and the water looked lovely and refreshing. There was a small bridge designed for UTVs to cross, and we paused to take a nice look.

Most of the times our maps don’t let us down, but this time they did! We had quite an adventure running out of trails that were posted open, and even losing one trail completely due to lack of use. Oh well, the RZR backs up pretty easily!

After two nights at Vedauwoo, we continued down I-80 to the Mirror Lake Highway (WY/UT 150) south of Evanston, WY. Thirty miles from the interstate we stayed at a large dispersed area where cross country skiers start their winter treks. It is known as the “Yurt” because the state puts up a big yurt here in snow season. We stayed two nights here too, meeting up with old friends from the RVForum.net who happened to be camping 30 miles away in a USFS campground. Steve made steaks and potatoes on the grill, and we had garlic bread and a Cesear salad to go with it. I made a nice peach cobbler for dessert, so we were all pretty stuffed.

We spent Tuesday night at the Elks Lodge in Mountain Home, ID. Nice people at the bar, and the camp area was very quiet. Wednesday we spent at the Fairgrounds in John Day, OR. We had reserved a site that was plenty long for us, but it was overhung with very low branches so we didn’t fit. Kevin found a camp host who got us moved to another site where the roof wouldn’t be rubbing branches. Starlink was pretty awful though due to the trees. Oh how spoiled we have become with fast internet (just about) everywhere!

Tonight we had landed for the holiday weekend at Big Pines RV Park just south of Crescent, OR. The Central Oregon SXS Club is having some group rides, and we are going to join them. It seems like they do more gravel roads than trails, but the country is pretty so we will survive. It is raining now, and a big thunderstorm is just barely passing us by (so far). It ought to help keep the dust down tomorrow!

Iowa – home again first time in 2025

It was time to get home. Always something to look forward to, and something we regret since we love the Southwest so much. I did some serious medication and lots of heating pad use, and I was able to drive semi-comfortably.

We left Monument Valley and went to Page, AZ, staying at the Elks Lodge 4 April. It was a gravel parking lot, and they charged $15 for dry camping. I thought that was fairly high, but, then again, Page is a big vacation spot. Very friendly people though. The next night we went to the Twin Arrows Casino outside Flagstaff, AZ. It is always an easy spot to stay, free, and not too noisy. On 6 April we spent the night at Santa Rosa State Park, NM. Lovely place. It is a bit of a pain to get to, but worth it for a beautiful and quiet spot. We thought about staying two nights, but there was weather coming in, so we kept going.

Monday saw us all the way through Texas and into Elk City, OK where we spent the night at the Elks Lodge. Again it had no hookups, but we were able to find a nice spot. We got to Oklahoma City fairly early on Tuesday. We stayed at the Edmond Elks Lodge. Not very nice due to crowding. We could hear a lot of conversations from surrounding coaches! We stayed two days because a group of elementary and high school friends were getting together. I keep forgetting how little I have in common with the people I went to high school with! I think this will be the last time I try to get together with them. Life definitely does go on.

We spent 10 April on the trip at the Kansas Star Casino south of Wichita. Great place to spend a quiet night for free. The lot we stayed in was gravel, but it was pretty flat and relatively unoccupied. There is an alternative spot closer to the casino that was asphalt, but it was slightly more occupied. Our last night was spent at the Walmart in Osceola, IA. Lots of reefers running all night, but it was handy. A bad wind was coming, so we left early and headed straight home.

We got here this morning and put the motorhome at Big Woods Lake County Park. We are about half unpacked, and we will finish tomorrow. The cats are enjoying the space. Each of them is rubbing their faces over pretty much every surface, marking the place as theirs after so long.

With the new RZR and tariffs being on and off, Kevin has ordered all kinds of things for it. We had them delivered to my oldest son’s place. A lot of things are big (front and rear windshields, bumper, etc.), and our son has joked that he will give us the bill for the storage unit the items required! He also said we owe the poor UPS guy who has to walk up 20 steps or so to their front door! Kevin will be fully employed getting everything put on. I have a list of things to quilt, and I need to get them done before we leave again around Memorial Day, so most posts going forward will probably be quilt-related.

What can be said about Monument Valley that hasn’t been said?

Wow, wow, and wow. We are absolutely overcome with the beauty of Monument Valley. I have wandered around a lot of red rock country, but just never made it here before. We got here on Monday and just rested up. Here is looking out the door of our motorhome at Gouldings RV Park.

We also went to the Mitten viewpoint. On the 31 of March (Monday) the West Mitten shadow shows up perfectly aligned with the East Mitten. We were ready to take pictures, but at the last minute the clouds covered the sun and the shadow was lost. We did get some preliminary pictures though.

On Tuesday we took full day tour with a Gouldings Navajo guide named Marvin. It was cold and windy, so we were glad we had a regular enclosed van for the tour. Most of the 3 hour tours were in open vehicles!

We started the trip by visiting the lesser traveled Mystery Valley and having lunch cooked over a fire mostly by his wife. Oh, and we got stuck in sand! It took Marvin, Kevin, and Rick (the other person on our tour) to push the van while I put it in low and gunned it. They really shouldn’t send guides out in an 2 wheel drive van when all the signs say 4WD required! After lunch we visited Monument Valley. Instead of posting pictures chronologically, I am going to arrange the pictures more by type of scenery.

Arches. There were lots of arches.

And then there were the remnants of the ancestral Puebloan people (previously called Anasazi).

They were a small people based on the size of their hands

Notice the craftsmanship still present in the ruins. Square corners and a combination of large and small stones to keep the walls straight.

And then there is just the raw. beauty of the place.

We stopped at a hogan in Mystery Valley where an older woman explained the process of weaving beginning with the sheep shearing (manual because no electricity!), washing, carding, spinning, and weaving. She had some beautiful things for sale, but it was out of my budget. Maybe I will have to save up for the next time we come.

We didn’t see much wildlife; this is a hard country. We did see this hawk.

We had dinner on Monday at Gouldings Inn Restaurant (Navajo tacos for both of us) and breakfast at the same place (French toast combo) today. Food was good, and service was quite adequate despite a number of reviews saying the opposite. We had wanted to visit the various museums, but my back is still giving me fits. I have another radioablation on my medial nerve scheduled for 23 April, and I can hardly wait.

We have had some wild weather while we have been here. Monday it was windy with a big dust storm, overcast, and cool. Tuesday it was cold and windy with more dust. Wednesday we got rain, snow, cold, clouds, and sun. Today wasn’t as bad though it did rain a bit and snowed a bit more.

Tomorrow we go to Page to register the new RZR then head to Grants for Saturday, assuming the weather is ok.

Out of Quartzsite for this year

We left Quartzsite on Monday, 23 March, planning on gradually working our way home to Iowa. This is the picture Kevin took on Sunday night of the sunset. It was taken through a long lens, and then it had be reduced in quality some, but it is an impressive sunset view from our campsite.

We first went to Lake Havasu City, spending 4 nights at the Elks Lodge there. I went to a “Staycation” with the Havasu Quilters guild Monday through Wednesday. The problem was that I was still very, very sore from my back spasms. I didn’t get nearly as much done as I intended. I finally sewed up the quilt block for March’s Block of the Month, but I am not very happy with it. It is not only not my best work, it isn’t even my average work. Oh well, it will do though. I made some little scrubbers for gifts from a kit I have been hauling around for a couple of years. They will be cute in a gift package of a mug and hot chocolate mix (the fabric is hot chocolate related). I also finished all the 8 star blocks I needed for my Christmas quilt, but I didn’t get much more accomplished. All day Monday back would spasm for 30-60 seconds while I just tried to breathe through it. It really sucked. Tuesday was better with no spasms, just soreness. Wednesday the pain was bad. The staycation is normally a treat with lots of good companionship, good food, and lots of sewing time.

After LHC, we headed north to Monticello, UT. We spent one night at the NavajoLand RV Park in Tuba City, AZ on the way. It was decent but not really set up for a rig our size. In Monticello we are staying at the Western RV Park. It is another older campground where we barely fit, but they obviously just redid their sewer system with a lot of fresh gravel on all the sites.

The reason we are in Monticello is because Kevin bought a new side by side! The shop is in Grand Junction, CO, and we drove the truck with the old RZR in the back from Monticello to there. Why? Because when we leave here tomorrow we are headed back to Monument Valley, UT and then to AZ to complete all the paperwork. We had planned on picking it up after we left Monument Valley, but they had rebates that expire tomorrow. But first a bit about the trip up to Moab on the way to I-70. I don’t think we had ever driven the road headed north, though we have done it southbound a few times. It is a glorious drive. There was haze and we had a schedule to meet so only a couple of pictures, and those were through the windshield. The first was the lovely La Sal mountains south of Moab. Lots of snow on their peaks.

And then we started getting to the fabulous rocky outcroppings as we got nearer to Moab. I loved this one the most, and I named it “Haystack.”

And here is Kevin in the brand new rig! It is a Polaris RZR 900 Trail Sport. We got a very good trade in, rebates, and additional deals because they had a bunch of 2024 rigs still in stock. It is a 900cc engine with 75hp and real doors that don’t require contortions to get in the rig. Even the seats are more comfortable. Now he gets to keep the UPS driver busy bringing all the accessories to make it street legal and comfortable. Things like roofs, windshields (front and back), mirrors, and storage boxes are all aftermarket. Kevin has a great time shopping for them, and putting them all on will keep him busy when we get home. I can hardly wait until we can take it out on the trails!

We leave tomorrow for Monument Valley. I will post as we finish that portion of the trip.

Edited to add: We had an absolutely fabulous late lunch at Bella Thai in Moab. It is probably the best Thai food I have ever had! I wanted to make sure I had it in the post because I look back a such info later on.

Quartzsite Redux

We are staying at a different location in the Tyson Wash LTVA than we were the last time we were here. The crowds are gone, so we moved a bit closer to the entrance. We back up to a wash, and there have been quite a few birds coming by – quail, hummingbirds, doves, and some other ones I don’t know. A friend has a trail cam, and I am definitely going to buy one before we head out for the summer. She puts it out every night, and she finds lots of cool creatures. One time a bobcat came by! Not here luckily.

We definitely have done a bit of riding since we arrived and my back has improved. I am still taking it easy, so no long, rough group rides. We enjoyed this view from the “Q” mountain (someone put a rock art Q on it). I have posted other pictures from a nearby spot, and the reduction in campers is significant.

One of the interesting things in the area is this old mill just outside the town. It is always fun to wander around it.

We took one 55 mile jaunt out past the famous Quartzsite golf course. You are advised to bring colored ball, orange being the most popular. The 9 hold course has marked holes with flags .There always seem to be people on the course.

We also took a side trip to the old Scott’s Lead Well. There is an old corral, a broken watering tank, and water storage tanks. They aren’t working anymore, so the fish and game folks installed a new wildlife guzzler. The tank is underground, and it has a well to pump. If the water gets low, they come out and fill the underground tank. When we were there we startled a bunch of birds away. The video shows the ride up to the old tanks, and the still picture shows the guzzler and the old tanks in the background. As usual, click on the link to get the video.

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Sadly the desert will filled with trash. We collected 1 1/2 sacks of small pieces of garbage since we couldn’t take any big stuff. This is a burned out fifth wheel someone had taken out to a lonely spot and torched. Probably an insurance scam: “Oh officer, the rig was in perfect shape before it was stolen!” Disgusting..

This is a memorial to a local bicyclist. The bicycle was actually stolen a few months back, but they replaced it.

It is still very, very dry, but the ocotillos have started blooming even though there isn’t enough moisture for their leaves to come out. They are among my favorite desert plants.

Our ride took us out to the Cyprus Copperstone Mine. It is an open pit gold mine that was very profitable. Now they are planning to dig underground in the same disturbed area for more gold. We didn’t get too close; they have gates that are locked. The pit is off to the right.

On the way back we hit the sandhills that are northeast of town. So many people think Arizona is just sand dunes, but they are actually pretty uncommon. Here is a short sample.

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I have been sewing some as I recover from the back problems. This is what I am calling “Midnight in the Desert.” I am in love with the colors of this, and I really like the way the circular star pattern shows up as a secondary design. I was planning on sandwiching and quilting it here, but I have decided I really want to get the intersections super flat with the LaraStar ironing system I have at home. The colors in the first picture are accurate, but those in the second picture are quite washed out. It does show the fabric design of the print though. I have also sewn a few hundred Christmas squares together, but I won’t show that one for a while yet.

Tonight Kevin got a great picture of a doze camouflaged in the brush. It was easy to hear him/her, but it took a bit of work to see.

And no post in the southwest is really complete without fabulous sunrise …

…. and sunset pictures.

We are heading to Lake Havasu on Sunday. It will be getting hot here – upper 80s into low 90s – so it is time to head in for electricity and air conditioning.

After Death Valley – KOFA National Wildlife Refuge

We left Death Valley on 1 March and went back to the Needles Elks Lodge. We did the necessary tasks of laundry and grocery shopping, then we headed to our favorite spot in KOFA along King Road. This spot is so pretty, sitting between two rugged mountains. Except for a friend that pulled in a couple of days after we set up, there was nobody within 100 yards.

The first picture is on the north side of our campsite.

This is just a bit to the side, just as the sun was almost gone.

We did go back to Cibola National Wildlife Refuge one day. This time we took the highway, and our friends took the 4WD road. We beat them by only 5 minutes or so. The paddle cactus blow was just starting to bloom in the garden there. I think it is a Beavertail cactus, but I am not foolproof on identification.

At least some of the cranes were still there, but a lot have already headed south.

There is so many places to ride the RZR here! The landscape is generally more vegetated than in Quartzsite, so here is a sample.

One of the key things the Fish and Wildlife Service does is maintain watering spots, known as tanks, for the wildlife. Here is a natural catchment area that has been enhanced. In prolonged dry spells, they will bring large water trucks in and fill the basins. I am quite impressed; the trail in was rough and narrow.

Sadly I came down with a massive back spasm while we were here that resulted in a trip to the ER in Yuma. Some heavy pain meds (400mg Gabapentin, an injection of an NSAID, and a Lidocaine patch), and I was able to walk out. But I sure didn’t do much the next few days! It was over a week before I felt 75% recovered, so we didn’t get to ride as much as we wanted.

We headed back to Quartzsite on Monday, 10 March. I finally got some more sewing done. Here is my in-process inspector saying I better get going!

Goodbye Death Valley (for now)

“Goodbye Death Valley!” That supposedly was the phrase uttered by one of the 49ers that were stranded there. I think she said it as prayer of salvation, but Kevin and I are always a bit sad. It is a fabulous place.

We did do a few things since I last posted. I am trying to make new bag covers for the collapsable chairs we keep on the RZR, and it isn’t as easy as it might seem! I made one, and it is waaaayyyy too big, so I marked what size it should be and soon to rip out the stitches of the big one to remake it. Not my favorite task, but ripping is part of sewing so I will see it through. While I was involved with that, Kevin hiked Golden Canyon with our friend Ron. He said it was lovely, but I don’t have the pictures. They left pretty early, and he was still hot when he got back about 3 hours later. We definitely had a heat wave.

WHen you have been to a place as many times as we have been to Death Valley, you tend to not re-visit the places that are nice but not awesome. We hadn’t been down 40 Mule Team Canyon for four years or so, because it is one of those “nice” places. The last couple of years it had been closed due to flood damage. We had a good short trip this time. The interesting thing about this little canyon is the amazing yellow mudstone backed up by black intrusions of volcanic-related rock. It was absolutely the wrong time of the day to capture this, so I increased the contrast so it might be at least somewhat visible.

We also took a drive down Greenwater Road, a dirt/gravel road that goes to Shoshone, CA. It cuts off just before Zabrisky Point. We were surprised at how many boondock campers there were. It is definitely a place where you could be by yourself if you had a very small rig. We only saw a couple of spots we would have fit in, and it was a long way from any of the standard Death Valley sites. The road ran through a broad valley most of the way with lots of creosote.

The first mile of the road was bad washboard, but it smoothed out to quite mild washboard. We stopped in Shoshone for lunch with an absolutely fabulous green chile burger at the Crowbar. Highly, highly recommended! Not only did the burger have thick slices of green chile and Swiss cheese, but the fries were divine. We rolled out rather than walked, but it was worth it. We then visited the lovely little museum next to the restaurant. Nice set of exhibits of Anglo settlement and mining, but also some good information about the local tribes and even some seriously pre-historic mammoth bones that had been found nearby. A university in California had returned them to Shoshone when they ran out of room. There were also tracks of some of the mega fauna that lived in the area 600,000 years ago. The mammoth track gives a good idea of how big they were, but I forgot to take a picture of the camel tracks which were very surprising.

We are back at the Needles Elks Lodge for a couple of nights. I had a video class on the Moda Block of the Month for March this afternoon, so we are waiting to do laundry tomorrow. It will probably take all day! Then we are going to a boondock site along King Road in the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. Beautiful site, but a long way from anywhere. We expect to spend a lot of time driving the RZR around.

Dark Sky Festival and West Side Road

The Dark Sky Festival was fabulous as usual. We attended the keynote addresses in the evening, and Kevin attended an astrophotography workshop that got his photography drive going. I also enjoyed the outside exhibits from the organizations participating. I am particularly interested in the autonomous rovers of all type – wheeled, winged, or snaked. The wheeled ones are obvious to most, and we have probably all see the helicopters too, but they actually had a fabulous 20’ long prototype of a snake-like “EELS” (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor) designed to go into and come out of crevasses to be found on a moon of Saturn. I even got to drive it for a minute or two until two little girls came up who needed the experience more than I did.

(Click to see EELS in action)

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Monday we decided to drive the West Side Road, a dirt/gravel road west of the main salt basin. There are some fabulous views of snow-covered Telegraph Peak from the road. Telegraph Peak is 11,000’+ high, and is usually snow covered in the winter. It is such an amazing contrast to the warm desert below. Here are the views as we drove the road.

There are lots of historic sites along the road. Tule Spring, Shorty’s Well, and others come from the buried Amargosa River flowing underground. There are also human related sites like where the original Death Valley 49ers were stranded for over a month until their rescuers arrived. There is also an interesting gravesite for some early prospectors. Shorty Harris was famous for being involved in many of the gold mines in the area, but specified his grave should say “Here lies Shorty Harris, a single blanket jackass prospector.”

Gravesite of Shorty Harris and his friend Jim Dayton

Last year we couldn’t drive the West Side Road because it had large areas of washout from the historic rains that gave us back Lake Stanley for a while. I posted pictures of the fabulous sight last year. The salt is fresh here, and since the road sees orders of magnitude less traffic than the famous Badwater Basin area, you can see the way the salt pan looks before it has been walked on by tens of thousands of people. The salt begins as a polygon shape.

In Some areas the crystals build upon each other. These formations are 2-3” tall.

Eventually the crystals stop forming and get partially covered by the never-ending Death Valley Dust. This is an older crystalline area that developed before last year’s rains.

As you continue on the road you will eventually get to the back side of the famous Badwater Basin salt pan. It is truly amazing.

Those tiny dots are people. The water is from springs that are almost always present.

I have also been doing quite a bit of sewing, though I don’t have much to show for it yet. I am putting together block after block for both of the quilts I am working on, and I am making good progress. I also cut out a new bag for the folding chairs we use on the RZR. The existing bags are nylon, and the sun has really destroyed them. My finger went right through one bag when I pulled it out for measurements! Kevin has been playing with his 3D printer and the telescope.

We also did a bunch of housekeeping tasks. We dumped our tanks and got water yesterday, so we did some laundry. It has been getting into the mid 90s in the afternoon, and I like my AC with those temps! We have been running the generator from 2-5 to cool off the last two days, doing the laundry at the same time. I think we have decided to leave on Saturday and head somewhere back into Arizona, though we haven’t decided where. We will almost surely go to a private campground to have electricity for the AC.