More Desert Fun

Trip Odometer 9962

First a little note on the odometer readings. These are current miles, not the mileage at the point that we are describing in the blog. As I type this I am sitting in the shade in Palisade, Colorado (spoilers!) but I’ll be writing in this blog about events that happened many miles and almost two weeks ago. Sometime today we’ll have traveled 10,000 miles – with many more to go.

All this to say that we need to catch up on our bloggins, so here we go!

Wednesday, May 10: We decide to leave early from Joshua Tree. (That means the Bettie Mobile is rolling at 11:30 am.) We are heading to Wilhoit AZ, just outside of Prescott, where it looks like we’ll have a funky little campsite at Burro RV Park that has a funky little bar at its center. We take Hwy 62 and head east through a vast amount of … well … nothing. (It’s amazing how many different kinds of nothing we’ve driven through — each one has been unique!) Until we get about 30 miles west of the AZ border, where the highway parallels the railroad tracks, and we pass a strange shoe memorial.

Turns out this is a known desert feature, with mentions in several roadtripping websites, and even a space on Yelp: Shoe Fence of Rice. There is also miles and miles of “rock graffiti” – names spelled out in rocks or other detritus parallel to the railroad tracks. Fascinating.

We travel on to Parker (hello again, Arizona!) and Bouse, then take 90 through Salome and Aguila. Somewhere along this route we begin to see saguaro cactus poking out of the sand. Next we take 71 to Congress, and we are lifted out of the desert valley and into the mountains. By Yarnell we’ve climbed to 4840 feet from our start of 2800 in the valley.

The Burro RV park is a bust. Bar is closed, no one is around to tell us where to go. We shrug and decide to just head straight in to Prescott and try our luck there. The road from Wilhoit to Prescott is crazy, twisty, turny, and up! We climb up to 6000 ft by the time we pull into downtown. We can’t find a campground with showers that doesn’t charge one arm and one leg, so we decide to give ourselves a break and stay the night at a Holiday Inn. We take hot showers, eat cheese and crackers, and give ourselves a blissful night’s sleep.

May 11: we wake up tired, and realize that those windy and sun-blaring days in the desert have taken a physical toll on us. We decide to give ourselves another day at the hotel, with MT running errands while KB worked. In the afternoon we tour Prescott College, where Kayla received her Masters degree through a self-designed, limited-residency program while living and working at Mt Edgecumbe High School in Sitka. Maybe it was because this was almost (*gasp*) twenty years ago, and/or maybe it’s because Kayla only spent something like 16 total days on campus, but NONE of it looked familiar. The most important Prescott connection was Kayla’s beloved advisor, Jeanne James — unfortunately, Jeanne’s dementia made a face-to-face visit unadvisable, but Kayla was able to share her admiration and appreciation for Jeanne with her husband, Dale.

That evening it was take-out Thai and TV, then another long sleep.

May 12: We set out for adventure with a general direction but no plan for where we will land. Hwy 89 to 169 to I17 to Flagstaff for provisions. Did some research over lunch, and decided to camp at the Navaho National Monument, which we reached via Hwy 89 to 160 through Tuba City, then 594.

What a cool spot! We saw wild horses on our way up to the park. The National Monument campground is free (!!), mostly full, (though we find our spot) and comically unlevel. Picnic tables are chained to the ground at impossible angles. Fire pits would require heroic chair balancing to sit around. We take our bikes to an overlook and watch the sun go down.

May 13: We stopped at the monument’s visitor’s center and took a nice hike around the rim of a canyon to view an old Hopi pueblo. Then we got back on the road.

Hwy 160 through Kayenta, Dennehotso, and Red Mesa, where we see a sign for their local radio station, 89.7. For a little while we enjoy “Rock Me Gently, Rock Me Slowly” before we ride out of range.

For our many past days in the desert (and those to come) we’ve enjoyed the benefits of a fairly “wet” spring. The have been some rains, and there are flowers everywhere. It seems as though each valley, ridge, and canyon has its own collection of flowers that add a little color to the landscape – though it is hard to take a picture that does justice. Along the drive we are both struck by a scene of white goats eating purple flowers against a red sand background.

We go through Teec Nos Pos and then arrive at Four Corners – where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah all meet. We think this would be an interesting place to have lunch until we are greeted with the $8 per person fee to enter a flat piece of desert surrounded by industrial hardware where the only attraction is that is sits on a geopolitical boundary. That’s a hard “nope”. We eat our sandwiches on the side of the road.

We cross into Colorado and land in Cortez, where we arrive at a campground that was originally a kids’ bible camp and is now more of a hippie collective that sits in the shadow of Mesa Verde National Park. As soon as we park the camper, it begins to thunderstorm and hail. Like, seriously. We spend the evening in the camper dining on cheese, hummus, ham, and crackers. And Jameson.

May 14: We spent the day exploring Mesa Verde National Park, looking at the remains of communities inhabited by the Ancestral Pueblo people and staring in awe at the incredible rock cliffs.

We’ll leave it there for now, but stay tuned for a quick post about Canyonlands and Arches – coming soon!