Nov 19, 2023 – Palm Desert, CA
So, what to do back in civilization? We took advantage of a Sunday breakfast buffet offered in the main clubhouse by our campground. The breakfast was good but very few people took advantage of it. In fact, the campground is probably half empty and it will become much less full as people leave at the end of the weekend. Apparently they will fill up, though, for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Returning to WAWA, we’d left the windows open and all the horizontal surfaces, including our open laptop were covered with gritty dust. In fact the grit continued to accumulate all day. There didn’t seem to be enough breeze to transport the grit but it accumulated nonetheless. Speaking of airborne stuff, we wanted to ride the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway but, with the high level of haze, we could barely see nearby mountains. Maybe tomorrow?
We did stop by Palm Desert’s Civic Center Park. They have a number of pickleball courts there and people were actually playing. So Bill sat in the camper doing some writing while Sandy finally got to play a couple of games. We later did some grocery shopping, stopped at a Total Wine to replenish supplies and did some other general browsing before returning to the campground for the evening.
Nov 20, 2023 – Palm Desert, CA
Happy fifty second wedding anniversary to us! It was another day with heavy haze so that ruled out a tramway ride for a second day in a row. Maybe things will clear by the time we head home and we can stop on our return trip. So, we settled for a day of doing chores which, in fact, needed doing.
First chore was to arrange for some camper maintenance. We considered stopping at the Winnebago factory service center in Forest City, Iowa, on our way home to have them take care of a recall issue and do some warranty work. A phone call changed that. We settled on a date in mid-March and will head back there in the spring.
We also needed an oil change and that takes a Ford dealer who is equipped to work on trucks. We finally located a dealer near where we were going tomorrow who’d be able to do the work that day. Yay!
One of our propane tanks had run out while we were at the Grand Canyon so we had to get that refilled. It wasn’t as easy as we might have hoped but we finally located a Shell station that took care of us.
WAWA was pretty cruddy both inside and out. Campgrounds prohibit you from hosing down your camper on site. That means you have to find a place in the business of washing trucks and RVs or a self serve place that has high clearance or an open bay. We couldn’t find the former but finally did locate an old self-wash place with an open bay. We had to wait for two box trucks in front of us to use the facility before we finally got our chance. Ah, that’s better!
Finally, the campground had a nice laundry so we used that to wash two weeks worth of clothing, bedding and towels.
Those few chores took most of our day. It was already dark and we were too tired to even consider going out for dinner. Sigh. Well, tomorrow we’d drive to our friend’s home in Rancho Cucamonga for Thanksgiving and have a nice, relaxing time there.
Nov 21, 2023 – Palm Desert to Rancho Cucamonga, CA
The drive to Rancho Cucamonga thrust us back onto busy I-10 with a side helping of cross winds. Fortunately, it was just one-and-a-half hours until we arrived at the Ford dealer in Upland to service the camper for us. A call to John & Mary Ellen got us a ride to their home ten minutes away with a stop for breakfast at Brandon’s Diner along the way.
A couple of hours after we had settled we got a call that the camper was ready to be picked up. Then, Sandy & Mary Ellen did some last minute grocery shopping after which we spent the rest of the day catching up and making dinner.
Nov 22-24, 2023 – Rancho Cucamonga, CA
We spent several laid back days with John & Mary Ellen celebrating the Thanksgiving Holiday and reminiscing about the “good ole days”. Sandy & Mary Ellen see each other every couple of years so the chatter is continuous!
Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday was spiral ham with all the fixings, including Mary Ellen’s apples & yams. And, lots of TV sports. The highlight the following day for Sandy & I was Penn State’s total victory over Michigan as well as the ham and bean soup made with some of the leftover ham and a dried bean mix. Yum!
As you drive northward anywhere in this area you see the San Gabriel Mountains rising directly in front of you. On Friday we took a drive to Mt Baldy in those mountains. On our way there we drove along Euclid Ave, regarded as one of the most beautiful streets in the country. It has been named to the National Register of Historic Places as a prime example that combined community planning, landscape architecture and transportation.
The trolley line that ran on the island in the middle of the street is now a walking path. But the beautiful California pepper trees that line the street have drooping branches that closely resemble willow trees. Also, the lovely homes along it remain. The area was once part of an inland citrus belt of San Bernardino County. Those have been replaced by urban development but the street, in all its beauty, remains.
Mount Baldy is both a small, unincorporated village that is located below Mount San Antonio, commonly also known as “Mount Baldy”. The cute little village is strung out along a steep mountain road. Notable is the Mount Baldy Inn, a gathering place where we stopped for lunch. The place was busy with people like us, locals and quite a few bicyclists who apparently use the road as a training run. We chose not to drive to the top of the mountain where there is a downhill ski area. Later, we had a very good dinner at Cask ‘n Cleaver.
Nov 25, 2023 – Rancho Cucamonga, CA, to Yuma, AZ
We left John & Mary Ellen’s home about 9:00 to begin our return trip. We plan to follow a southerly route home but without any particular plan beyond the first couple of days.
This day began with a drive to the east side of the Salton Sea. The Sea, which is 227 feet below sea level, was once part of the Gulf of California. It was alternately filled and dried out over geologic time. The current Salton Sea was formed when Colorado River floodwater breached an irrigation canal being constructed in the Imperial Valley in 1905. The water flowed into and filled the then dry lake bed.
Subsequently, the area was developed as a resort destination. That activity peaked in the late 1950s. The lake eventually became polluted and highly saline from agriculture runoff and tourism mostly ended. Today the Salton Sea State Park encompasses much of the east side of the lake. Viewing areas for the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge are located at the south end. There are many abandoned resort facilities and never completed housing developments along the lake.
We stopped at the park’s visitor center for a snapshot history of the area, to look over the campground and to walk to the water’s edge. We didn’t quite make it to the water because the beach became difficult to walk on as our feet started sinking into the salty, mucky “sand”.
It appears that someone, perhaps the park, attempted to stabilize the beach by burying hundreds of tires in the sand. You can see them sticking up, sometimes in roped-together bundles. It’s an odd sight. Another odd thing is that the sandy portion of the beach seems to consist mainly of tiny barnacle shells. Barnacles are not a common sight on an inland lake.
The south end of the Sea is on the border of the Sonoran Desert and the massive commercial agriculture operation of the Imperial Valley. This area, where the Sonny Bono Refuge is, sees some of the hottest temperatures in the nation. The refuge has the distinction of having some of the most diverse bird species of any national wildlife refuge in the West with over 400 recorded species. It is, therefore a birding hotspot for rare vagrant species.
Also at the south end of he Sea are eleven geothermal power plants. They use heat from the earth to produce steam, which runs turbines to produce electricity. It also happens that the geothermal brine brought up by the power plants is mineral rich, including lithium. It is one of the main sources for lithium for batteries in the US.
The main crops grown in the area are vegetables like lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower, melons, onions, carrots and sweet corn. We passed huge fields of irrigated fields of these crops.
We also stopped at a place called Salvation Mountain. It is a sort of massive sculpture built to celebrate God by a single man named Leonard Knight over a period of 28 years. It is built on a natural hill and shaped using a sort of crude adobe of mud and clay. The adobe was then painted over with many thousands of gallons of paint to decorate and preserve it. Since it rarely rains there it holds up pretty well. The man who built it died in 2014 but volunteers maintain this huge sculpture for visitors to enjoy.
Just a mile past Salvation Mountain is a place called Slab City. The place is an abandoned military base that people have now taken over to use as an immense, free campground. There is no water or electricity so campers must “dry camp”. We understood that most campers went to Slab City to spend the winter with only a very few permanent residents. It appeared to us, however, that many if not most of the people there were permanent residents. While we saw a few conventional RVs, most seemed to be broken down campers or ramshackle constructs that will never leave the place. There are signs of an organized society but the whole place seemed to be pretty much existing on the margins.
Continuing our drive along I-8 to Yuma, AZ, it was getting dark. Suddenly, we saw strings of multicolored lights moving around in the dark beside the highway. It turns out that we were driving past the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, known as Glamis. A portion of this 40 by 5 mile system of dunes is also the largest off-highway vehicle (OHV) recreation area for sand dunes in the US. Many hundreds of campers were set up in huge parking areas off the highway. The campers were all driving their OHVs around on the dunes at night. For visibility purposes they had multi colored LED light whips sticking up from their vehicles. We could see hundreds of them and it was a bizarre sight.
The dunes have appeared in movies like Star Wars, Lawrence of Arabia, and many others. OHV riding is restricted to a small portion of the dunes. Access to the rest of the area are by foot only. Some of the dunes can reach heights of 300 feet above the desert floor.
Arriving in Yuma, we headed straight to a Cracker Barrel restaurant where we ate dinner and spent the night.
Nov 26, 2023 –Yuma to Gila Bend, AZ
Gila Bend, who ever heard of it and why go there? Well, we never heard of it either but it’s the nearest town to where a large number of petroglyphs can be found at a campground on BLM land. In the desert twelve miles north of I-8 and halfway between Yuma and Tucson is the Painted Rock Petroglyph Site and Campground.
But, on our way there we watched last night’s OHV crowd roll by us. To keep fuel consumption reasonable, we drove a sedate 65 mph on I-8 which has a 75 mph speed limit. The OHV crowd apparently had no such fuel consumption concerns and they rolled past us by the boatload. Trucks with trailers and toy hauler RV after toy hauler flew by us on their way home to Phoenix or Tucson, each carrying at least one OHV. The number of them was amazing.
Taking our exit for the Petroglyph Site, the first thing we saw was a huge solar energy plant. It was not the kind of photovoltaic panel array we’ve come to expect these days. Instead, it was an array of parabolic reflectors that each focus on and heat liquid in a metal tube in its center. That heat, in turn, is used to run turbines to generate electricity. It turns out that it is termed a parabolic trough generating station and this one is owned and operated by Solana. When commissioned in 2013 it was the largest parabolic trough solar plant in the world, covering three square miles capable of producing 280 megawatts.
Arriving at the petroglyph site we found our $8 campground site and parked. The campground, which has about 60 sites, is almost hard to see in this flat, dry environment but it was nice with widely spaced sites. There is no electricity or water but there are nice pit toilets in an adjacent day-use parking area. The whole area is surrounded by mountains that are volcanic in origin. The old volcano that flooded this area is visible as a gentle bulge on the horizon.
Next to the campground is an outcropping of rocks. They are fenced off and surrounded by a walking path. The rocks are very dark, colored by so-called desert varnish. The hundreds of petroglyphs are almost all on one side of the outcropping. They are of two types, some mainly geometric shapes of grids, lines and spirals. The others are mostly representative of animate things or celestial bodies. The signage indicates they are from separate cultures that inhabited the area, the geometric types being older.
Why did people choose this pile of rocks for their work? Why just use one side of the outcropping? We don’t know and the signage didn’t offer any clues so we suppose no one knows. As to the meaning and purpose of the petroglyphs, although we can see what some of the later ones represent, no one knows. But they’ve been there for a long time and, hopefully, they’ll be there for a long time to come and they may, eventually, reveal their secrets.
That evening, before dinner, we sat out and enjoyed a pretty spectacular sunset and moonrise.
