After leaving our campsite, we headed south on S2 towards Blair Valley as there were a couple hikes Deb spotted that looked interesting. Both were down a few miles of dirt road but we’ve done that before, can do it again. The first hike was a short hike to some morteros, or rocks the ancient tribes used for grinding seeds. These would show up as round depressions in some of the rocks. The deeper the depression, the more it was used.
The road was not well marked and we had to turn around once we figured that out. No small feat in an RV on a narrow two-lane highway. It turns out that the entire area is used for dispersed camping; we saw trailers and RV’s scattered far and wide across the valley.
The road was also just a dirt two-track and we had bumped along for just a few hundred yards when we were stopped by a large depression filled with water. No way around it, gotta go through it. Aside from dragging the bike rack on the way through, I had no idea what the wheels would do when encountering this kind of mud. So I turned the RV around and we were about to execute plan B when a pickup truck towing a travel trailer pulled off the main road and came toward us. This guy seemed to know what he was doing because he didn’t hesitate at all the forks in the road, he just charged towards us.
So I waited to see what he would do with the puddle. He came by and just ran through the puddle as if it wasn’t there, his trailer swaying rather abruptly on the way through. The water didn’t seem to bother him.
So if he can do it, I can, too. And it was fine. Several more muddy puddles later, the road settled out into just a narrow sandy rut in the valley.
It’s a good thing that this RV is a bit older and already has its first scratch. We hugged a couple of cacti and desert sage as we passed, making a rasping sound as they went by. There were other RVs parked about here. I would imagine they are now sporting similar tattoos to what I just received.
After about 3 miles of this, we arrived at the stopping place for viewing the morteros. Walking around here is certainly easier than driving. We jokingly called it white knuckle driving at five miles per hour.
There were lots of morteros scattered around here. Deb remarked that this was their kitchen and it was a kitchen with quite a view. The morteros area was up on a hillside, and the whole expanse of the valley could be seen below.
A little bit further up the same road was the trailhead to another hike, a 3-mile round trip to some petroglyphs. No sooner had we started down that road then we came upon a sign saying that only highway-legal vehicles were allowed on this road, 4x4 recommended.
Well, can’t be any worse than the last three miles. Let’s go for it.
It was worse. Now there were large ruts in the middle of the road and some large rocks to dodge. Going around one rock, we heard a loud scraping noise and I found out later we hit the tailpipe, pushing it upward into one of the body panels. I was able to bend it back to its original position, the only damage being visible was some melting of the body panel from the heat of the pipe.
But was stopped us was a large depression in the road. Going into and out of that would surely have bottomed out the RV and gotten us stuck in the middle of the desert. So we had to admit defeat and turn around. We’ve seen a couple other stuck vehicles the last few days: a bus conversion which unsuccessfully attempted a similar depression in the road, and a semi mired in the sand by the side of the road. We didn’t want to become one of THOSE people.
As we returned to the main road we saw more and more of what is very popular around here: motorcycles. This area is a Mecca for cyclers who ride far into the backcountry. We noticed that many of the RVs out here were, in fact, toy haulers, and people came and camped out here to ride their motorcycles.
Since this hike was curtailed, we drove on to the next point of interest, the Agua Caliente County Park, just outside of Anza-Borrego. This park is best known for its hot springs that are captured into three pools of various temperatures.
I have a new name for this park. It should be called Agua Frio instead of Agua Caliente. Agua Caliente means hot water, Agua Frio means cold water. We found out after we paid our entry fee and dressed down to enjoy the pools that the park had run out of the gas used to keep the pools hot, so they were now cold. How disappointing. We took a dip in the pool anyway. Several people from the campground came to test the water and immediately walked away because it was too cold. We went swimming because this water was about the temperature of Lake Michigan on a good August day. They probably thought we were crazy.
We were now a couple hours ahead of schedule. There were a couple more hikes we were looking at on the way south. We missed those trailheads because they were so poorly marked, only figuring it out when we drove into an area of large wind turbines outside the park. We stopped along the road to replan the next couple of days. We had planned to go into Mexico on Monday, using Sunday to attend a worship service somewhere and then pick up groceries and do laundry. However, now we had much of today still to go and were at the end of our agenda. So we decided to do the Mexico thing on Saturday instead of Monday and just push forward into Yuma today. So we changed the appointments we had made for Monday and drove into Yuma.
After chatting with our camping group over a very bad connection, we found a laundromat and started the laundry. We ate dinner in the parking lot. After the laundry was done, we found a nearby grocery store and picked up some groceries. Since it was now dark and searching for dispersed camp sites is quite difficult in the dark, we drove to the Quechan Casino just outside of Yuma to stop for the night. This casino is just a couple miles from the border and it will be just a short trip tomorrow morning.
The casino has a very large gravel lot specifically for RVs, and, during snowbird high season, this lot is apparently packed with people all headed into Mexico. Today there is only a few dozen scattered about, and I think some of them are overnighting here before going onward to the nearby sand dunes--a very popular place for ORVs. Think Silver Lake on a very grand scale.
We had to pay a $10 fee to park here, and in order to pay the fee, I had to get a Player Card. I guess I am now an official player in this casino. I saw quite a few of these player cards in use while getting the parking pass. All of them were stuck into various slot machines while their owners repeatedly pushed the button and watched the symbols scroll by on the screen. Not my idea of fun.
It’s not the quietest area here. In addition to a large RV parking area, there is an adjacent truck parking area and a few semis have pulled in and out in the time we’ve been here. Also, as I write this, a Camaro in the main parking lot is just sitting there idling, and its loud rumble can be heard from quite far away.
I hope we sleep tonight.
Another item to add to the “World’s Largest” list: Yuma, Arizona is the world’s sunniest city, with an average of 4,015 hours of sunshine per year.
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