From Mission to Missile

Map of this blog's locations click this link to open the map

There was a bit more going on at the geocaching Mega Event on the Monday after it, including a trip into Mexico for another event, but a friend from Rochester NY was coming out to Tucson to visit some of her relatives and we thought it would be fun to catch up with her. So we had agreed to head to Tucson. Mary Ann's nephew and his wife were currently living in their rig at the KOA next to Lazydays. She reserved a cabin there for a few nights and then would move in with us for a couple nights when the cabins were all booked up. Originally her brother was also going to bring his rig here, but it was in the shop so they just stayed at a nearby motel.

The drive from Yuma to Tucson actually got us to see something other than Interstate 10. Not that Interstate 8 is any better or more scenic, but it was different. We saw several huge livestock yards and an odd looking solar array farm on the way. The KOA was nice but admittedly a bit more expensive than we are used to. It comes with lots of amenities that we tend to not use so we generally don't stay at many KOA campgrounds.
We managed to get together as a group several times, but we sometimes found it difficult to arrange places all seven of us wanted to go to. So sometimes Mary Ann went with us to see things and geocache along the way while other times she went with family members. It was definitely an action packed week. We have become accustomed to a slower pace and not trying to fit in all sorts of activities in a short timeframe. But obviously with Mary Ann being on vacation and only here for a short week, there were lots of things to see and do in the Tucson area. In the end, I think it worked out well.
There were numerous caching trips. One trip took us to the University of Arizona to do a webcam cache. This type of cache is one where there is not a container with a log to sign, but brings you to an area where a webcam located and you need to get a picture of you off of the webcam. Only existing webcam caches are permitted, so there aren't that many remaining. When they first came out, you generally needed to arrange with somebody on a computer to log into the webcam and save off a picture after you arrive there and called them on your dumb phone. With smartphones and tablets, it is usually easy to perform these steps in the field.

The Five of Us By the Bikes in Lower Right

In the same area of the webcam was another cache located on somebody's front yard. We generally don't feel comfortable doing these types of hides but this particular cache had many favorite points and there was a group of 5 of us so we felt fine attempting it. It was easy to spot the house we were heading to from some distance. The whole yard was filled with unique metal sculptures with no real common theme. Some were cute, others were whimsical while a few were downright odd. Many of them were mounted on springs so they would move in the wind or if you gave them a light push. We eventually spotted the cache container hidden amidst all the artwork. While we were signing the log, the home owner came out to chat with us. Turns out he was the metal working artist and has been creating these things for decades. He even invited us to enter his backyard to see more of his creations. There was even an old pickup truck in front of the house with all sorts of bugs and insects welded to the hood, roof and fenders. I suspect the truck hasn't been driven in ages, but would make for an interesting drive.

Old Pickup Truck Attacked by Insects

Horny Dudes

Flowers in Backyard

One morning we drove back across I-10 to allow Mary Ann to get a cache in the state of New Mexico. We were driving on a windy day and were warned about possible dust storms closing the interstate. On our way back, we did see and drive through what was a very minor dust storm but it didn't really impact visibility. After we made it back to Tucson, we met up with her relatives and did a few caches including ones up on Sentinel Peak which gives a great view of the area.

View from Sentinel Peak

Another trip took us to the San Xavier del Bac mission just south of Tucson. Having done ones in the San Antonio area, we sort of knew what to expect, but this one has gone through a very extensive restoration on most of the sculptures and artwork. It is in very nice shape for a church built in the late 1700's. We had walked thru the church and then watched the video describing the restoration efforts. Probably should have seen the video first since we felt the need to go thru the church again to see some of the details we missed in our first pass.

Front of San Xavier del Bac Mission

Inside the Ornate Church

One of the Side Vestibules

Some of Many Dozens of Sculptures

Just a little further south of the mission is the Titan Missile Museum. This place proved to be quite interesting. It is one of many such sites built during the Cold War era and house a 103 foot Titan II missile. We did the hour long tour and found it to be about the right length of time. They have other tours, one 5 hours long, but I doubt we would have enjoyed that one as much. After a 15 minute video telling about the history of the place, we then went out of the visitor's center and entered the below ground area through a set of stairs adjacent to the missile silo.

The Titan Missile Museum

Inside the control center, our tour guide - a volunteer - gave us the rundown on how the missile worked and how the controls would be used. It is rather impressive although I suspect our smart phones have more computing power than the control room does. The whole control center is mounted on giant springs to help it survive a strike had one occurred thus allowing it to hopefully launch a counterattack and make sure the whole planet was wiped clean of life. Supposedly upon the command to launch, the missile would be airborne in 58 seconds. The missile had three preprogrammed targets and one would have been prior to launch. After the tour below ground, you can do the self guided tour of various above ground sights including looking into the half open hatch door. If you are in the area, it is worth the trip.

Our Tour Guide at the Controls

Old Jeep to Patrol the Area

Looking Down the Silo

One other trip with Mary Ann was to the Saguaro National Park West. We didn't spend a lot of time there since we needed to drop her off at the Sonora Desert Museum right after lunch. We checked out the visitor's center and then did a short drive to a trail in order to find a virtual cache that was along the trail. Our lunch spot was very pretty but the winds were quite strong. Another park we stopped at with Mary Ann was one that doesn't seem to have a name associated with it - hmmm? But anyways, what brought us here was a geocache. The hide itself wasn't all that special, but the park had about 20 bronze sculptures of all sorts of animals and not just those found in the desert. We had fun exploring the area and checking them out.

Old Building Along Path at Saguaro National Park West

Shelter Near Parking Lot

Our Lunch Spot was Special

Entrance to Safari Trail

Just Hanging Around with Saguaros in Background

Which Little Piggy Went to the Market?

Setting the alarm clock for 4:30AM wasn't easy, but I was glad the KOA was only about 5 miles from the airport. It was fun to see a familiar face and catch up. Maybe we will see her or somebody else in the future looking to visit an area we are staying as we travel the country.

Off to Yuma

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Our next stop after Lake Havasu City was going to be Yuma Arizona. The main reason for heading there was to attend a Geocaching Mega Event the following weekend. So what is a Mega Event?, you ask. It is a large (>500) gathering of geocachers coming together to enjoy games, conversation and of course caching. This would be our ninth Mega Event but our first one this far away from New York State.

The campground we were heading to was Cactus Gardens RV Park. We had taken advantage of a deal at the Quartzsite RV show to stay there for a week for $99. The drive would take us back down US Route 95 right thru Quartzsite. Our timing was pretty good. We haven't had television coverage for almost 3 weeks and our travel day was Super Bowl Sunday. By leaving early enough, we were able to arrive in time to setup and watch what turned out to be a great game.

This campground is nice enough. The sites are a bit tight, but we weren't here for the park's amenities. It is a 55+ age park so we were definitely on the young side of distribution of folks staying here. Based on the license plates, many of the people here are from the western provinces of Canada. Probably half the sites in the campgrounds are park models and as we walked around, there were several for sale. I don't think we are ready to settle down yet and probably not here.

We had a few days before any of the activities were to take place. So we decided to do just a bit of exploring. We managed to get in a bike ride just north of the campground along a well maintained dirt road with plenty of caches. Given we are pretty much in the desert, it was slightly surprising to see how much of an agricultural area this part of the country is. Some of the crops were too small and too far away to identify what they were growing, but the broccoli fields were big enough to harvest. They use irrigation on a massive scale on the farms. There are numerous man made canals crisscrossing the area to feed water to the fields. Some had large sprinkler systems in place while others used some sort of flooding technique to supply the water.

Fields of Green

Irrigation Canal with Date Trees 

One day we headed into town to check out Gateway Park. This is adjacent to the Yuma Territorial Prison. We didn't arrive early enough to make paying the admission to the prison worthwhile but it did look like an interesting place to tour during some future visit.  The park is right next to the Colorado River. There is an old locomotive on display and of course there is a geocache hidden right underneath the thing. Another stop while we were in Yuma was to try out their famous date shakes. Okay, I'll admit I had not heard of them before and they didn't sound all that appealing but Martha's Gardens was just a couple miles from our campsite so on one hot afternoon we gave them a try. Surprisingly we thought they were very tasty. They are made fresh to order and even had smaller pieces of dates in them. If you ever have the opportunity to try one, I would highly recommend it.

Locomotive at Gateway Park

Just a Few Valves to Play With

Horse Sculpture at Martha's Garden

Palms for Sell!

Before we had reserved the deal at Cactus Gardens, we had considered staying at an Escapees park on the south side of Yuma. The KOFA Ko-op Retreat is different than the Escapees park we have stayed at in the past so we headed there to get a feel for the place and see how it might work out for some future visit. We drove around the sites and then went in to talk to the nice couple behind the desk. They were getting ready for some big Valentine's Day dinner in the recreation room, but took the time to explain how the park works and then showed us some of the amenities there. You cannot reserve a site but can stay in the boondocking area until a spot opens up.  The nice thing about this place is the sites are a bit more spacious than most of the other campgrounds in the area.

We got in touch with a couple we met at the Newmar rally in Quartzsite since they were camping in the Yuma area. We headed up to the BLM boondocking area they were up at Imperial Dam about 15 miles north of where we were. We had wanted to check this area out in case we want to stay here in the future so it worked well to visit with them and see the area. Later in the day was the first extra geocaching event associated with the Mega event. It is called a flash mob. These style events are usually in some high visibility area - this one was at a large open air shopping center. They also generally have some unique theme - this one had everybody dance around a large traffic circle waving money in the air while songs were being played over loud speakers. The money was then donated to a local food bank. With a couple hundred geocachers gathered, we far exceeded the rest of the people that just happened to be there. Some were probably not pleased since we stopped traffic for nearly 20 minutes - with the help of mall security. We even managed to meet up with a few cachers that had flown in from New York to go to this event and do caching in the area. It was nice to see familiar faces even if it was only for a brief time.

At the Entrance to Yuma Proving Ground

Ol' War Horse

Everybody Needs One of These

Dancing with Cash for Charity

The following day had an event that was going to take you to 20 different places in the city where you would collect info that would then allow you to get a geocoin upon successful completion. Having done ones like this in the past at other cities, we were expecting each location to have a geocache with a word or phrase hidden inside the container. The night before the event, they gave out a list of coordinates for the 20 places. I decided it made sense to get prepared for the next day by entering them into our handheld GPS. It turned out that one of the locations was only about 600 feet from our campsite. So at 10:45PM, we headed out the door with flashlight in hand and walked  out the campgrounds and up the street just a bit to find a large container hidden underneath a big bush. The log sheet was blank meaning we were the first ones to find it. The next morning, the cache that was hidden there was published and over 200 people came to find it. It felt good to have beaten all of them there.

One of the Twenty Places We Went to Around Town

The actual Mega Event wasn't until Sunday. The day turned out to be a rather cool and breezy day but the sun came out and with all the hundreds of people there at the park, it ended up being a very nice time.  There were several "games" you could participate in. One was a poker run. We walked to five different locations scattered around the park and picked up a card in an envelope. Then bring them back to have a volunteer open all your envelopes and see how good your poker hand was. We actually did reasonably well with 3 threes. In fact our hand was the 9th best of all those playing. Unfortunately they only paid out to the top 8 hands with the 8th place hand getting a whole $1.00.

At the Mega Geocaching Event

Chris Chums it up with Signal the Frog

Another event was to take a small flag and stick it into the ground at a very specific location defined by coordinates. Chris used her GPSr and I used mine and when we both had the "perfect" spot we were about 4 feet apart. Of course there were quite a few flags already place at other folks "perfect" spot. Most of the flags fell within about a 15 foot radius. We did not end up winning and we forgot to go back over to see how far off we were from the designated spot. The "log sheet" for this event was just a big white board. As we were leaving at the end of the event, it looked pretty impressive. See if you can find our geocaching name "rushrutter".

The "Logbook"

Lake Havasu City

Map of this blog's locations click this link to open the map

We had reserved a site at Cattail Cove State Park just a bit south of Lake Havasu City so we would have a place to go after our boondocking experience. The drive up US-95 was very easy. Initially the view out of Quartzsite is just lots of flat desert with the occasional hill or mountain jutting up in the distance. But when we get near Parker Arizona, the terrain changes quite a bit. It follows the Colorado River and there are large mountains everywhere.

The entrance into the park is down a rather winding road to get to water level. Lots of people come here to use the boat ramp and beach area and most nights the campgrounds are fully booked. The site only has water and electric but it is 50 amp which is one less thing to worry about. We are able to dump our nearly full tanks on the way in and since we are here for only 6 nights, tank capacity won't be a problem. 

View of Cattail Cove State Park Marina and Campground

We decide to drive the dozen miles into Lake Havasu on our first full day here just to get a feel for what it has to offer. I'll admit, it was a bit larger than I was envisioning. We found a 9 hole disc golf course at Grand Island Park and decided to check it out. The course was fine and we did alright (meaning: we lost no discs!). As we were heading back to the car, there was a cache nearby and we found another cacher looking hard for it. After a brief search, we discovered the hide and then stood and talked with the woman who was from the Pacific Northwest but camping in the area for the winter. 

We then headed over the London Bridge and went out to check out a few of the lighthouses. The ones we stopped at were scaled replicas of other lighthouses. One of them was even from New York State. Next we stopped at the London Bridge. I still find it hard to imagine this thing was disassembled in  London, all the parts numbered, shipped here and reassembled here. Several of the block still appeared to have the numbers visible. There was a cache right at the bridge and as we approached we saw 3 other people searching the ground, the stone wall and the bushes but to no avail. I was hoping that we would come up and just show them where it was hidden but after 15 more minutes of searching with them, nobody could spot it. We walked along the river area and took some pictures before heading up to the topside of the bridge. When we turn and look up, we see the three other cachers up there and had mad the find. That is one problem with caches located near bridges (or worse, parking garages), you are never sure what elevation to be looking at. 

View Across Lake Havasu into California

Chris Rests at Lighthouse Replica

London Bridge at Lake Havasu

Pretty Light Pole

View from Atop the Bridge

The following day we did some hiking in the state park we are camped at. There are even a handful of geocaches placed by the park personnel. The trail we did followed the river but was 50 feet above the water level. We found most of the caches we tried but did have trouble with one of them. After looking at the hint and past logs for any help, I discovered that a good friend of ours from Rochester NY had found this one about 9 months earlier. The text I sent her for help apparently was initially confusing, but she came thru later in the day and we came back out a couple days later to make the find.

Great Formations at a Cove Along Trail at State Park

Very Hilly Terrain on Our Hike

One portion of the trail we took was thru a narrow slot canyon. It was pretty neat to have the rock walls go up on either side as you walk down the middle. This one was not huge being only a few tenths of a mile long and the walls were about 30 feet or so tall. As we came back around to the campgrounds we came thru the overflow camping area. The lot was far from level and one of the motorhomes had its front tires lifted a good 16 inches off the ground. That was a scary sight and not good for the suspension on the rig. Plus the overflow costs $20 per day and with all the free BLM land in the vicinity, it's not clear why somebody would choose to stay here.

One day we headed up to SARA park. It is a big park just on the south side of town with lots of hiking, mountain biking and other activities. We came to do one specific hike that sounding interesting - the SARA Mountain Park Loop Trail. "The Crack" was the portion of the 5 mile hike that intrigued us. Here is the description from a trail guide:

• To begin your hike, go through the gate at SARA Park and follow either trail (yellow or red) down to the canyon, which eventually narrows to an arms width, tumbling down a series of dry falls through the crack.  
• Except for a seven-foot dry fall, you can, with care, readily negotiate the drops. 
• The seven-footer is smooth and can be slid down, like in a playground. It is possible to climb back up on the rocks alongside the waterfall. 

There were many people out walking the various trails in the area. As we arrived at the crack, there was another couple just ahead of us trying to navigate one of the drops and not having the best of luck. We jokingly offered to push them but they declined and asked us to show them how it to attempt it. With the pressure on, we managed to make the one drop without incident and they followed our lead. In short order we made it to the 7 foot drop and made it with no real problems but possibly without a lot of grace or style points. 

Starting Into The Crack

Narrow and Deep Portion of Slot Canyon

Chris Braves the Slide

We continued down the wash and eventually made it to the Colorado River. We could see a picnic table/shelter and even a bathroom just across from where we came out. Of course it took a fair amount of walking to get over to the spot. We ran into 2 other couples taking a break with their 2 dogs. Both dogs were incredibly well behaved given we were eating our sandwiches right in front of them. 

Balanced Rock

View of the Colorado River on Hike

More Rock Formations

For the return hike, we opted to take the high trail that goes up and around the crack. It was interesting to see the place from this different perspective. Plus we did not need to try to climb up all of the drop offs that are in the crack. With our side tracks to a handful of geocaches along the way, our hike was nearly 7 miles. The hike is one of the favorite ones we have done. Maybe some future blog post can highlight the top hikes we have found during our travels. 

Looking Down on Exit of The Crack

The weekend we were in the area, there was a vintage travel trailer show at Lake Havasu State Park. It sounded like fun so we headed there to check it out. Fortunately the park had a special rate if you were only coming in for the show. We felt we could could afford the $3 cost of admission. There were about two dozen trailers setup in a big parking lot with the proud owners wanting to show them off. 

Small Bright Red Trailer

Cute Little Scotty 

Interesting Lines

The oldest one we noticed was from the mid 1940's. As might be expected, most of them were quite small with several teardrop trailers. A few of the people had equally old classic cars there to pull their trailers and of course the two vehicles were color coordinated. Many of the people insisted we go inside to check them out and would tell us all sorts of info about them. I can't say there were any that "spoke" to us enough to want to trade in the motor home. 

Old Trailer with Matching Old Car

They Don't Make Wagons Like This Anymore!

Cute Trailer

While in town, we headed back to the library to get some things done and found the wi-fi was working significantly better for me than the last time I had stopped. After we got kicked out of the library when they closed, we headed to a newer Mexican restaurant in town. Azul Agave turned out to be a very nice place to eat. The burrito I ordered was one  of the best I can remember. 

One other day trip we took was a big loop between the Parker Dam and the town of Parker. The 40 mile loop followed the Colorado River on both the California and Arizona sides. The Parker Dam is apparently the tallest in the world at 320 feet! It doesn't seem that impressive mainly because you only see the upper 25% of it. We picked a very nice picnic spot overlooking the dam and Lake Havasu which was created with the completion of the dam in the mid 1930's. 

Parker Dam and the Hydro-electric Plant

Upper Side of Dam From Our Lunch Spot

Dam from California Side

There is a big hydroelectric power plant connected to the dam but unfortunately they no longer give tours of the inner workings. In fact, even though you can drive across the top of the dam to enter California, you aren't allowed to stop or walk onto the dam. We did stop and walk around the areas open to the public before we continued our drive along the river heading south. 

Along the way, there were many places to stop and check out. Plus there are numerous campgrounds all along the river on both sides. The road has many curves but the warning signs about burros on the road prevented me from taking them too fast. Well the signs and the fact our vehicle is definitely not a sports car! At one point we stopped to check out a burro family grazing along the road. And a bit further down there were two burros on the shoulder of the road. 

But Will We See Any?

Burro Family

Yep Burros on the Road

We came back into Arizona at the town of Parker and stopped at the big casino there to check it out. The boondocking area in the parking lot was sloped pretty significantly and likely would not have been a good place to stop with the motorhome. The casino also has a camping area but we didn't check that out. We did one big loop around the inside of the casino and decided the noise and smoke wasn't for us. The area around the casino had a great deal of rigs boondocking. But the area must be a huge off-road vehicle destination because about all we noticed in the distance was the sound of and dust from those people out there playing. 

The guy in the site next to us at the state park was constantly tossing bird seed around his rig so there always seemed to be some sort of birds or ducks wandering around outside our rig. One of the more prolific birds that kept showing up were interesting because of their strange head ornament. The California Quail were an interesting one to watch since they almost seemed to be dancing as they were eating. 

California Quail Coming for Food

Looking for Bird Seed