And I hoped this was mine.
I drove south down the Salton Trough through the fields of the Imperial Valley and then east on Interstate 8, squeezing between the Imperial Sand Dunes and the border with Mexico. On one side ATVs climbed the sand dunes, on the other a huge wall protected the nation from the hemisphere’s poor. I did not find it a very pleasant place. Border Patrol was stopping traffic heading the other way, but I was spared for the time being. It was December 21, the first day of winter, and after nearly six months in California, I was crossing into Arizona.
Yuma lies directly across the Colorado River on the Arizona border, and I stopped there to try to figure things out. It was Sunday and the BLM office was closed, so I tried a Chamber of Commerce Visitors Center but as is usually the case with Chambers of Commerce, this office had little insight into tent camping. I had to wing it. I headed north along the Colorado River into BLM land and began a crash course on desert camping in southwest Arizona. It was one confusing situation, and I spent two days figuring out that this seeming plethora of camping opportunities along the lower Colorado River offered nothing that suited me at all.
Nearly 100,000 people flock to the Yuma area for the winter, most of them in RVs. So many people were establishing themselves out in the public lands that BLM had to step in and regulate it. The result was the Long-Term Visitor Areas (LTVA), a fascinating regulatory complexity. It is almost entirely an administrative system, staffed by volunteers, and has few facilities. Its primary objective is to limit the stay of visitors.
In the summer season, April 16 through September 14, campers can only stay in an LTVA for 14 days in any 28 day period. After 14 days they have to move outside of a 25-mile radius of that LTVA. In the winter season, September 15 to April 15, campers can choose between staying two weeks at one LTVA or staying all season. Of course all of this cost money.
I might have been satisfied for a few days in some far-flung corner of one of these assemblages but as a tent camper I was not allowed to. Without a self-contained unit, that is if you don’t have your own bathroom, you can only stay at an LTVA unit with rest rooms. There were three of these in the Yuma District. To stay in one of those I would have to camp within 500 feet of the actual restroom, which meant in practice I would have to set up my tent pretty much in the middle of a rocky RV parking lot. I would not be that desperate.
The landscape where all this is situated is rather bleak, the desert at its least appealing. It is all what was once the floodplain for the Colorado River when it ran wild, but now just dry rocky washes set off by rounded rocky hills, the rocky remains of alluvium deposits from centuries of old floods. This is the Colorado Desert, the driest and hottest of them all. Without the floods, nothing much grows. Creosote and rocks and RVs clustered and scattered about. Monumentally unscenic.
This RV landscape was one of the saddest I’d ever seen. Good rates I suppose, great weather for the most part, but what a view, what a life. I know it doesn’t mean the people themselves are sad, but I sure found it sad. Then I learned that one reason so many were clustered near Yuma was to be near Mexico, where they go for cheaper medical treatment, and I could only shake my head more. I wondered if anyone had done any sociology on this.
Dispersed camping was allowed in some places so I checked a few out and they were just as despairing - crowded and littered patches of palo verde. I gave up and headed to the only formal campground in the area - the Squaw Lake Campground - which cost $15 and was no treat. A central parking lot amid a town park-like setting with scattered picnic tables, far fewer picnic tables than parking spaces. No correlation between parking spaces and campsites, no specific tent sites at all, really; people could set up tents wherever. Most of the people were in campers of one sort or another and didn’t seem to care about picnic tables. They were paying for a parking space, and presumably the flush toilets. The park has a boat launch, but not many boats were using it.
I walked in a hundred yards or so to the most isolated area and earned myself some space and quiet and dried out droppings from feral burros. The evening was as warm as I’d had in a while. Fully-grown palm trees suggested a wetter history, though I don’t know how fast palm trees grow. A distant generator clawed like a spotty lawn mower. It was only 7:00 PM so I figured I had no right to complain. It felt like 8:00 PM, and a mile to the west it was. An owl hooted. The lake was filled with raucous coots. The rest room shone like moonlight.
I went back into Yuma the next day to try and figure things out but spun my wheels and ended up returning to Squaw Lake CG. Traffic mid-day Monday three days before Christmas was hellish, at least by my increasingly rarified standards. Things were not going well and I was getting pretty discouraged. My head echoed with Sir Paul’s “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time”, which despite its banality began to grow on me. The problem was I only knew the one-line chorus, sung over and over. I thought maybe I could conjure up a wonderful Christmas time on chant power alone, but I wasn’t counting on it. On the other hand it was a lot warmer. Highs were barely hitting 60, lows weren’t dipping below 50. My kind of temperature range.
Underlying the landscape are the dams, storage basins, pumps, pipelines and who know what else of the lower Colorado River water management infrastructure. It isn’t an easy thing to understand or visualize, and it doesn’t provide much information or interpretive signs, though it offers plenty of recreation sites. The main facility in this area north of Yuma is Imperial Dam, built in the 1930s to raise the river level high enough so it can flow downhill through canals to irrigate enormous amounts of agricultural land in southern California and Arizona.
The amount of water flowing in the river at this point is controlled by dams upstream to match the amount of irrigation water Imperial Dam is scheduled to distribute. If the incoming flow is too high, due to unanticipated rain or sudden repairs downstream, the water is pumped to Senator Wash Reservoir two miles upstream, and released when needed.
The biggest challenge is controlling the enormous sediment load this river is still carrying even after all the upstream dams. Extensive desilting works are meant to remove as much of the sediment as possible in order to prevent it from clogging the canals. When Imperial Dam was first build it had a reservoir an initial capacity of 85,000 acre-feet. Sediment quickly reduced this to about 1,000 acre-feet, and dredging is required to maintain that much capacity in order to keep the irrigation water flowing downhill. Sediment removed from the water is “sluiced” to a settling basin behind Laguna Dam, the first dam on the Colorado but made otherwise superfluous by Imperial Dam. After settling, the sediment is moved to land alongside the river, simulating the historic effect of flooding.
As would be the case through most of the US desert, the military is a major presence around Yuma. It is by far the biggest employer in Yuma County, though soldiers were not as prominent as at Twentynine Palms as far as I could tell. Marine Corps Air Station Yuma takes advantage of “some of the cleanest skies and best flying weather in the United States“, and boasts one of the longest runways in the country. The US Army’s Yuma Proving Ground is one of the largest military installations in the world, and is used for testing nearly every weapon system in the ground combat arsenal. “[S]parkling clean air, low humidity, skimpy rainfall—only about 3 inches per year—and annual average of 350 sunny days, add up to almost perfect testing and training conditions.” Yuma Proving Ground provides “realistic desert training, especially before deploying overseas“, and has set up “realistic villages and road networks representing urban areas in Southwest Asia“ to test counter measures against improvised explosive devised (IEDs), the number one killer of American service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. (I got these quotes from Wikipedia, not a source I usually cite, but the military obviously provided the text and provided no original sources for me to check.)
Tuesday morning was December 23rd. Usually it didn’t much matter to me what day it was, but given the significance of the 25th of this month I had to keep an eye on it. The morning was chilly and windy, mostly cloudy, and not terribly appealing. I headed off to Imperial Wildlife Refuge, established to protects 30 miles of lower Colorado River and maybe restore or at least simulate the cottonwood and willow forests that lined the river when it was allowed to flood. The refuge harbors loads of water birds over the winter, birds which - as with all Wildlife Refuges - can be shot in season.
I strolled the Painted Desert Trail, ash flow from volcanoes 23-30,000 years ago, colored in pinks, oranges, and reds, sparsely punctuated by palo verde and ocotillo. I’d see a lot more colorful and exotic formations in my time, but this was an enjoyable start. No camping though, so I headed off to the Martinez Lake Resort, which for some reason I thought offered public camping but turned out to be reserved for the Marine Corps and its veterans, though not, I assumed, their progeny. What I wanted (or didn’t want) was nearby Fisher’s Landing. It was better than the dispersed BLM though not as nice as Squaw Lake. It only cost five dollars and I could pull my car right up to my picnic table. No restroom in the entire area. I don’t know what people were expected to do, but it couldn’t have been too hygienic.
Tuesday night, December 23rd , the strangeness continued, even intensified. I wasn’t sure I could even describe where I was or how I felt. I was under a lone tree, with a picnic table, a fire pit, my tent, and my car, on a mostly dirt filled wash. Others were camped near but not too near. A dowdy resort bordered the “campground”. There was a bar 500 yards away that worried me, some light, some voices, but the night went well enough. I was up early and headed out in the dark to the wildlife refuge picnic area where I ate breakfast and could use those facilities.
Christmas Eve now. I headed up to the Arizona town of Quartzite, where an enormous temporary fair was setting up and RVs were converging en masse. The fair was rumored to include a great book shop, but I found the situation frightening so I crossed the river back into California, and the town of Blythe. The forecast and the temperature and the fact that it was Christmas Eve enfeebled me enough that I took shelter in an inn. I felt grateful but a little ashamed. I went out and toured a rather blighted downtown Blythe. Many boarded storefronts. An appliance store was having a going out of business sale but they didn’t bother on Christmas Eve. Rite Aid, however, was hopping with holiday shoppers.
Basically Christmas Eve began abominably and had me worried, but I talked to some of my sisters on the telephone and then had a sweet enough nap that after dinner I was able to read for a couple of peaceful hours. Warm and quiet and hopefully rejuvenating enough to renew my quest.
I found myself feeling atypically tenderly toward the Christmas Story. This was obviously due to the fact that instead of working retail I was wandering through strange towns wondering where I would sleep, if I would find peace. Thankfully I wasn’t pregnant, though I thought having a pregnant woman with me might be nice. I wanted to find a church, nicely lit and dark and cozy and listen to the Christmas story, while looking at the saints and the stained glass windows.
I thought of the motel Bible. I often check motel drawers out of curiosity to see if the Bible is there and it almost always is. Now for the first time in my motel life I actually wanted to read the Bible and perversely this motel didn’t have one! They always have Bibles.
Christmas morning was cloudy and raw, though if it rained overnight it didn’t rain much. The forecast continued to call for showers, but the sky didn’t look very threatening. I was in a quandary. I wanted to stay where I was. For one, I seemed to be experiencing a little anxiety toward the outside world. Secondly, I wanted to watch the Celtic-Laker game. I decided to stay for while and let the decision work on me while I watched the first game between Orlando and New Orleans. This proved to be some pretty bad NBA, giving a nudge to the part of me that wanted to be out on the road listening to Baroque Christmas music. So off I went, hurting more than I’d hurt thus far, consoled by the most disconsolate Christmas music I had with me, which was Diana Krall singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Christmas Time is Here”. I sure would have liked to hear those plaintive Charlie Brown characters sing that last one, but I didn’t have them with me.
This was my general state of mind out on the highway when I ran smack into a Border Checkpoint. The first one I had encountered surprised me by asking where I was going, so this time I was ready. Oxbow Campground. I even had a brochure. But instead the guy asked me where I was coming from, and this really threw me. I was coming from Seattle, and the Sierras, and a few days in hell in southern Arizona, and a motel whose name I never learned in a town I'd never be able to come up with at a border checkpoint. These thoughts were not coming sequentially of course but all at once, and all my mouth managed to synthesize from them was "I don't know - back there". The officer was not impressed. He had been in a relaxed lean against a pole and while he didn't stand up his whole body and face indicated that standing up and becoming serious was a distinct possibility if I didn't come up with a better answer than that. I apologized for my confusion, which seemed to help and then managed to say I was camping "up and down the river", and oddly that proved good enough. Perhaps Border Patrol has a profile for Americans thoroughly befuddled when stopped in their own country to explain their whereabouts.
I proceeded on to Oxbow Campground, a place two seemingly knowledgeable people in Yuma had recommended. It was sunny but horribly windy and desolate. I was intrigued by what appeal this bleak and banal place might have and considered staying in order to discover it. But I was more interested in shelter than existential challenge and was soon back onto the highway. I’d gotten an early enough start so I could still make it further north to the Lake Havasu area where Arizona State Parks had some campgrounds. As I approached the scenery began to get dramatic and I was cheering up until I stopped at the first campground I came to and it was charging $20. I checked out the next one - $23! I’d have to bite the bullet at least this one night. It was a nice enough place but all the campers were in Rvs. I asked around a bit and learned I could camp in a cabana, which was more a shelter than a cabana, but with possible rain coming in I figured it for a break. But the bigger break came when I went to the kiosk to pay and saw a sign saying camping was free on December 25! Thank you Santa.
After eating I started out on the park’s nature trail, a fine little trail for which I instituted a new award: best nature trail utilizing a highway overpass. Broken, rocky thinly vegetated terrain. I saw my first saguaro cactus, quite isolated and seemingly out of place. The primary cactus was cholla, mostly buckhorn cholla, then a cluster of cute little things I learned are called teddy bear cholla. Buckhorn Trail extends onto jeep tracks you could hike as far as your endurance, or more importantly your sense of direction would allow. Probably big ORV country in season, but only one was out there in the distance on Christmas. The Colorado River. Must have been something. Wonderful outcrops, mountains and cliffs. The landscape is very Arizona-looking, as the sun goes low it angles on the mesas suggesting the famous Arizona Highway school of photography. Countless RVS littered the landscape though, RVS is every view. It was actually hard to take a picture without getting an RV in it somewhere. How many RVS enter Arizona in winter? It must be an enormous number.
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Back to my cabana at dusk, very windy, not yet rainy, not yet cold. I set up my tent to maximize wind protection at the expense of rain cover, and didn’t put up my rain tarp, a gamble I take in order to minimize wind rattle. Plus I was basically all worn out in the tent assembly department. In fact, I was beat. Merry Christmas, Terry
Yuma lies directly across the Colorado River on the Arizona border, and I stopped there to try to figure things out. It was Sunday and the BLM office was closed, so I tried a Chamber of Commerce Visitors Center but as is usually the case with Chambers of Commerce, this office had little insight into tent camping. I had to wing it. I headed north along the Colorado River into BLM land and began a crash course on desert camping in southwest Arizona. It was one confusing situation, and I spent two days figuring out that this seeming plethora of camping opportunities along the lower Colorado River offered nothing that suited me at all.
Nearly 100,000 people flock to the Yuma area for the winter, most of them in RVs. So many people were establishing themselves out in the public lands that BLM had to step in and regulate it. The result was the Long-Term Visitor Areas (LTVA), a fascinating regulatory complexity. It is almost entirely an administrative system, staffed by volunteers, and has few facilities. Its primary objective is to limit the stay of visitors.
In the summer season, April 16 through September 14, campers can only stay in an LTVA for 14 days in any 28 day period. After 14 days they have to move outside of a 25-mile radius of that LTVA. In the winter season, September 15 to April 15, campers can choose between staying two weeks at one LTVA or staying all season. Of course all of this cost money.
I might have been satisfied for a few days in some far-flung corner of one of these assemblages but as a tent camper I was not allowed to. Without a self-contained unit, that is if you don’t have your own bathroom, you can only stay at an LTVA unit with rest rooms. There were three of these in the Yuma District. To stay in one of those I would have to camp within 500 feet of the actual restroom, which meant in practice I would have to set up my tent pretty much in the middle of a rocky RV parking lot. I would not be that desperate.
The landscape where all this is situated is rather bleak, the desert at its least appealing. It is all what was once the floodplain for the Colorado River when it ran wild, but now just dry rocky washes set off by rounded rocky hills, the rocky remains of alluvium deposits from centuries of old floods. This is the Colorado Desert, the driest and hottest of them all. Without the floods, nothing much grows. Creosote and rocks and RVs clustered and scattered about. Monumentally unscenic.
This RV landscape was one of the saddest I’d ever seen. Good rates I suppose, great weather for the most part, but what a view, what a life. I know it doesn’t mean the people themselves are sad, but I sure found it sad. Then I learned that one reason so many were clustered near Yuma was to be near Mexico, where they go for cheaper medical treatment, and I could only shake my head more. I wondered if anyone had done any sociology on this.
Dispersed camping was allowed in some places so I checked a few out and they were just as despairing - crowded and littered patches of palo verde. I gave up and headed to the only formal campground in the area - the Squaw Lake Campground - which cost $15 and was no treat. A central parking lot amid a town park-like setting with scattered picnic tables, far fewer picnic tables than parking spaces. No correlation between parking spaces and campsites, no specific tent sites at all, really; people could set up tents wherever. Most of the people were in campers of one sort or another and didn’t seem to care about picnic tables. They were paying for a parking space, and presumably the flush toilets. The park has a boat launch, but not many boats were using it.
I walked in a hundred yards or so to the most isolated area and earned myself some space and quiet and dried out droppings from feral burros. The evening was as warm as I’d had in a while. Fully-grown palm trees suggested a wetter history, though I don’t know how fast palm trees grow. A distant generator clawed like a spotty lawn mower. It was only 7:00 PM so I figured I had no right to complain. It felt like 8:00 PM, and a mile to the west it was. An owl hooted. The lake was filled with raucous coots. The rest room shone like moonlight.
 |
| Squaw Lake |
I went back into Yuma the next day to try and figure things out but spun my wheels and ended up returning to Squaw Lake CG. Traffic mid-day Monday three days before Christmas was hellish, at least by my increasingly rarified standards. Things were not going well and I was getting pretty discouraged. My head echoed with Sir Paul’s “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time”, which despite its banality began to grow on me. The problem was I only knew the one-line chorus, sung over and over. I thought maybe I could conjure up a wonderful Christmas time on chant power alone, but I wasn’t counting on it. On the other hand it was a lot warmer. Highs were barely hitting 60, lows weren’t dipping below 50. My kind of temperature range.
Underlying the landscape are the dams, storage basins, pumps, pipelines and who know what else of the lower Colorado River water management infrastructure. It isn’t an easy thing to understand or visualize, and it doesn’t provide much information or interpretive signs, though it offers plenty of recreation sites. The main facility in this area north of Yuma is Imperial Dam, built in the 1930s to raise the river level high enough so it can flow downhill through canals to irrigate enormous amounts of agricultural land in southern California and Arizona.
The amount of water flowing in the river at this point is controlled by dams upstream to match the amount of irrigation water Imperial Dam is scheduled to distribute. If the incoming flow is too high, due to unanticipated rain or sudden repairs downstream, the water is pumped to Senator Wash Reservoir two miles upstream, and released when needed.
The biggest challenge is controlling the enormous sediment load this river is still carrying even after all the upstream dams. Extensive desilting works are meant to remove as much of the sediment as possible in order to prevent it from clogging the canals. When Imperial Dam was first build it had a reservoir an initial capacity of 85,000 acre-feet. Sediment quickly reduced this to about 1,000 acre-feet, and dredging is required to maintain that much capacity in order to keep the irrigation water flowing downhill. Sediment removed from the water is “sluiced” to a settling basin behind Laguna Dam, the first dam on the Colorado but made otherwise superfluous by Imperial Dam. After settling, the sediment is moved to land alongside the river, simulating the historic effect of flooding.
As would be the case through most of the US desert, the military is a major presence around Yuma. It is by far the biggest employer in Yuma County, though soldiers were not as prominent as at Twentynine Palms as far as I could tell. Marine Corps Air Station Yuma takes advantage of “some of the cleanest skies and best flying weather in the United States“, and boasts one of the longest runways in the country. The US Army’s Yuma Proving Ground is one of the largest military installations in the world, and is used for testing nearly every weapon system in the ground combat arsenal. “[S]parkling clean air, low humidity, skimpy rainfall—only about 3 inches per year—and annual average of 350 sunny days, add up to almost perfect testing and training conditions.” Yuma Proving Ground provides “realistic desert training, especially before deploying overseas“, and has set up “realistic villages and road networks representing urban areas in Southwest Asia“ to test counter measures against improvised explosive devised (IEDs), the number one killer of American service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. (I got these quotes from Wikipedia, not a source I usually cite, but the military obviously provided the text and provided no original sources for me to check.)
Tuesday morning was December 23rd. Usually it didn’t much matter to me what day it was, but given the significance of the 25th of this month I had to keep an eye on it. The morning was chilly and windy, mostly cloudy, and not terribly appealing. I headed off to Imperial Wildlife Refuge, established to protects 30 miles of lower Colorado River and maybe restore or at least simulate the cottonwood and willow forests that lined the river when it was allowed to flood. The refuge harbors loads of water birds over the winter, birds which - as with all Wildlife Refuges - can be shot in season.
 |
| Painted Desert Trail - Imperial NWR |
I strolled the Painted Desert Trail, ash flow from volcanoes 23-30,000 years ago, colored in pinks, oranges, and reds, sparsely punctuated by palo verde and ocotillo. I’d see a lot more colorful and exotic formations in my time, but this was an enjoyable start. No camping though, so I headed off to the Martinez Lake Resort, which for some reason I thought offered public camping but turned out to be reserved for the Marine Corps and its veterans, though not, I assumed, their progeny. What I wanted (or didn’t want) was nearby Fisher’s Landing. It was better than the dispersed BLM though not as nice as Squaw Lake. It only cost five dollars and I could pull my car right up to my picnic table. No restroom in the entire area. I don’t know what people were expected to do, but it couldn’t have been too hygienic.
Tuesday night, December 23rd , the strangeness continued, even intensified. I wasn’t sure I could even describe where I was or how I felt. I was under a lone tree, with a picnic table, a fire pit, my tent, and my car, on a mostly dirt filled wash. Others were camped near but not too near. A dowdy resort bordered the “campground”. There was a bar 500 yards away that worried me, some light, some voices, but the night went well enough. I was up early and headed out in the dark to the wildlife refuge picnic area where I ate breakfast and could use those facilities.
Christmas Eve now. I headed up to the Arizona town of Quartzite, where an enormous temporary fair was setting up and RVs were converging en masse. The fair was rumored to include a great book shop, but I found the situation frightening so I crossed the river back into California, and the town of Blythe. The forecast and the temperature and the fact that it was Christmas Eve enfeebled me enough that I took shelter in an inn. I felt grateful but a little ashamed. I went out and toured a rather blighted downtown Blythe. Many boarded storefronts. An appliance store was having a going out of business sale but they didn’t bother on Christmas Eve. Rite Aid, however, was hopping with holiday shoppers.
Basically Christmas Eve began abominably and had me worried, but I talked to some of my sisters on the telephone and then had a sweet enough nap that after dinner I was able to read for a couple of peaceful hours. Warm and quiet and hopefully rejuvenating enough to renew my quest.
I found myself feeling atypically tenderly toward the Christmas Story. This was obviously due to the fact that instead of working retail I was wandering through strange towns wondering where I would sleep, if I would find peace. Thankfully I wasn’t pregnant, though I thought having a pregnant woman with me might be nice. I wanted to find a church, nicely lit and dark and cozy and listen to the Christmas story, while looking at the saints and the stained glass windows.
I thought of the motel Bible. I often check motel drawers out of curiosity to see if the Bible is there and it almost always is. Now for the first time in my motel life I actually wanted to read the Bible and perversely this motel didn’t have one! They always have Bibles.
Christmas morning was cloudy and raw, though if it rained overnight it didn’t rain much. The forecast continued to call for showers, but the sky didn’t look very threatening. I was in a quandary. I wanted to stay where I was. For one, I seemed to be experiencing a little anxiety toward the outside world. Secondly, I wanted to watch the Celtic-Laker game. I decided to stay for while and let the decision work on me while I watched the first game between Orlando and New Orleans. This proved to be some pretty bad NBA, giving a nudge to the part of me that wanted to be out on the road listening to Baroque Christmas music. So off I went, hurting more than I’d hurt thus far, consoled by the most disconsolate Christmas music I had with me, which was Diana Krall singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Christmas Time is Here”. I sure would have liked to hear those plaintive Charlie Brown characters sing that last one, but I didn’t have them with me.
This was my general state of mind out on the highway when I ran smack into a Border Checkpoint. The first one I had encountered surprised me by asking where I was going, so this time I was ready. Oxbow Campground. I even had a brochure. But instead the guy asked me where I was coming from, and this really threw me. I was coming from Seattle, and the Sierras, and a few days in hell in southern Arizona, and a motel whose name I never learned in a town I'd never be able to come up with at a border checkpoint. These thoughts were not coming sequentially of course but all at once, and all my mouth managed to synthesize from them was "I don't know - back there". The officer was not impressed. He had been in a relaxed lean against a pole and while he didn't stand up his whole body and face indicated that standing up and becoming serious was a distinct possibility if I didn't come up with a better answer than that. I apologized for my confusion, which seemed to help and then managed to say I was camping "up and down the river", and oddly that proved good enough. Perhaps Border Patrol has a profile for Americans thoroughly befuddled when stopped in their own country to explain their whereabouts.
 |
| Oxbow Campground Colorado River |
I proceeded on to Oxbow Campground, a place two seemingly knowledgeable people in Yuma had recommended. It was sunny but horribly windy and desolate. I was intrigued by what appeal this bleak and banal place might have and considered staying in order to discover it. But I was more interested in shelter than existential challenge and was soon back onto the highway. I’d gotten an early enough start so I could still make it further north to the Lake Havasu area where Arizona State Parks had some campgrounds. As I approached the scenery began to get dramatic and I was cheering up until I stopped at the first campground I came to and it was charging $20. I checked out the next one - $23! I’d have to bite the bullet at least this one night. It was a nice enough place but all the campers were in Rvs. I asked around a bit and learned I could camp in a cabana, which was more a shelter than a cabana, but with possible rain coming in I figured it for a break. But the bigger break came when I went to the kiosk to pay and saw a sign saying camping was free on December 25! Thank you Santa.
After eating I started out on the park’s nature trail, a fine little trail for which I instituted a new award: best nature trail utilizing a highway overpass. Broken, rocky thinly vegetated terrain. I saw my first saguaro cactus, quite isolated and seemingly out of place. The primary cactus was cholla, mostly buckhorn cholla, then a cluster of cute little things I learned are called teddy bear cholla. Buckhorn Trail extends onto jeep tracks you could hike as far as your endurance, or more importantly your sense of direction would allow. Probably big ORV country in season, but only one was out there in the distance on Christmas. The Colorado River. Must have been something. Wonderful outcrops, mountains and cliffs. The landscape is very Arizona-looking, as the sun goes low it angles on the mesas suggesting the famous Arizona Highway school of photography. Countless RVS littered the landscape though, RVS is every view. It was actually hard to take a picture without getting an RV in it somewhere. How many RVS enter Arizona in winter? It must be an enormous number.
 |
| teddy-bear cholla |
 |
| Buckhorn Trail |
Back to my cabana at dusk, very windy, not yet rainy, not yet cold. I set up my tent to maximize wind protection at the expense of rain cover, and didn’t put up my rain tarp, a gamble I take in order to minimize wind rattle. Plus I was basically all worn out in the tent assembly department. In fact, I was beat. Merry Christmas, Terry
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