Victoria Mine

 Our first day with no driving.  We hiked out to the abandoned Victoria mine right from our campground.  It was a 3 hour hike round-trip. We got a late start.  It was the wrong time for birds but we did manage to see our first verdin.  Bird of the Day!  Plus gila woodpeckers, cactus wrens and phainopeplas.

The mine was interesting enough for a destination

Ruins of mine store with the parks namesake cactus in foreground

and had beautiful views of the surrounding mountains.

Connie was here!

On the way back we found hiking in the sun a bit too hot even though it was probably only about 25 C at the hottest. We're still acclimatizing! We spent the rest of the afternoon recuperating in the shade.

It's the last day of the President's Day weekend so all the younger people cleared out in the morning and only the snowbirds remain. We've met people from Maine, Campbell River, California, etc. Only problem is we can't tell them apart. We all look alike! 

No sunset tonight but we have a hedgehog cactus in our campsite in the evening glow.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

 

We arrived at Organ Pipe at 9 am and snagged the first spot available for 1 week.  Only later we found out it was President's Day long weekend so we were lucky to get in.  Also Family Day in BC, a holiday I will never cease to bitter about.  All my working life I used to say we need a holiday in February to help us get through the long winter.  It finally got declared after my retirement and now I never remember that it even exists because it's just like any other day! 

We're so glad to finally stop driving we just got set up and put our lawn chairs out and relaxed for the rest of the day.  We were assigned an accessible site so we've got a liitle extra space for a tent pad and we're not so close to our neighbors.  And it comes with our own little resident cactus wren nest.

Later in the afternoon we walked down to the visitor centre to get a bird checklist and use the wifi (very slow) to update this blog.  It's a twenty minute walk each way through the desert so we got a little exercise.

We're happy to reconnect with all the usual desert birds: canyon wren, gila woodpecker, raven, curve-billed thrasher, ...  Now that we have the Merlin bird app, maybe we'll be able to distinguish it  by call from the other thrashers we have so much trouble identifying.  The checklist says they also have Crissal's and Bendire's thrashers.

But the bird of the day is the crested caracara, the national bird of Mexico, which can only be seen just north of the border.  We saw two feeding on a roadkill on the drive into the park.

In the evening we were delighted to attend a ranger's talk at the outdoor amphitheater.   These were a staple of my childhood and parks all over North America still have them, left empty and unused by fiscal restraints.  Only the national parks still keep it up. The last time we attended an evening talk was in Grand Canyon in 2015. 

Anyway the talk was about how the the ecosystem of the park has changed over the millennia.  I learnt a few things.  Like, they carbon date fossilized packrat nests to determine what the vegetation was during specific eras.  There's no fossils in deserts because no water but the packrats' urine does the job!

San Luis Reservoir to Ajo, Az

 

Our longest day of driving yet.  We turned east at Bakersfield and climbed up into the Tehachapi Pass, a really beautiful area of pines and live oaks. 

On the other side we descended to the Mojave desert - windmills and Joshua trees. 

At Barstow the road suddenly got packed; we'd joined up with the highway from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on a Friday afternoon.  Another few hours of driving and we crossed the Colorado River. We were in Arizona. 

In the past we'd stayed in the overflow parking lot at Lake Havasu State Park, but when we arrived at dusk, on a Friday night, even the overflow was full.  So we drove out of town and ventured up a gravel road in the gathering darkness unsure of what we'd find.  What we found was a ton of rv's parked all over the place and we found a level spot to overnight in a little to close to the road.

In the morning we woke up to this:

We headed into town to attend to business: stocking up on groceries, filling up with water, repairing a tire, and then we were off to Organ Pipe National monument right on the Mexican border.  First we had to pass through Quartzite, boondocking capital of Arizona.  There's not much to recommend it, in my opinion, except for the free camping.  The desert here is pretty flat, dry and barren. 

They did have rain though, the brittle brush was blooming along the roadside.  We stopped at a rest stop where the hillsides were yellow with tiny flowers.

We'd already learned that the campsite at Organ Pipe was full for the weekend.  We had a free camping area nearby already picked out and found a site before the sun set.  Again too close to the road but we will be leaving in the morning.  

Compare this lush desert scene to Quartzite above:

We went for a walk as the sun was setting.

Bird of the Day:  A phainopepla was calling in the palo verde trees, and we saw an unidentified hummingbird, but this site was surprisingly devoid of birds.

Yreka to San Luis Reservoir

 

A day of steady driving.  We drove past Mt Shasta covered in snow.  The giant reservoir Lake Shasta was pitifully low.  Then down into the Central Valley where the almond groves were just beginning to bloom.  We heard on the radio that 80% off the world's almonds are grown here and that its big big business for the US bee industry.  There's also olive and orange groves and rice fields.  Further south the I5 veers up into the foothills where there's cattle and Sheep ranching. 

We arrived at San Luis Reservoir south of Modesto, CA, just at dusk, and set up in the dark.  When we awoke in the morning we found ourselves in a very pleasant campground underneath live-oak trees right by the lake. 

The reservoir was full due to recent flooding.  There was a boil water advisory, unfortunately, due to recent flooding.  I read on an info sign that the reservoir is home to hundreds of thousands of overwintering waterfowl but we were too late. They are already heading north. Still I saw scaups and ruddy ducks.

Ft. Langley to N California

 

We braved the I5 highway through both Seattle and Portland today, no mean feat.  Seattle was busy but straightforward, but no big slowdowns.  The traffic continues steady till you get past Olympia.  It calms down a bit but then ramps up again for Portland, where traffic came to a standstill for no apparent reason.  We spotted a three-lane on-ramp where there were 3 traffic lights to alternate which individual vehicle got to proceed to the freeway.

We camped at Champoeg State Park, just south of Portland.  The campsite was busy, we got the second last available spot though there were plenty empty spots marked reserved, a North America wide problem it seems.  Went for a short walk down to the Willamette River before darkness fell.

Woke up to frost and drove through fog all morning.  Much of Oregon had a dusting of snow over night.  Another day of straight driving.  We stopped in Grant's Pass to buy a cellphone program, but so far have not successfully upload it.  We need to phone them to get help, but guess what, we don't have a phone!

We finally gave up, and drove up over the Siskiyou (sp?) Pass and into California.  Smuggled a lemon I just purchased in Grant's Pass into the state because noone was manning the agricultural inspection statement. Because of my agricultural training, I feel guilty, not smug, that I got away with it!

We stopped for the night at the first rest stop along the Klamath River. It was cold overnight, but we were snug with our furnace running.  The rest stop was quiet when we went to bed, but trucks came through all night and we woke up surrounded by big rumbling rigs.  A frosty morning. Minus 5 degrees C.

Snowbirds Once More

 

It was a hectic few days as we got the trailer ready for our first big snowbird trip south since the pandemic.  As well we had to leave the house in decent shape for our housesitter.

It snowed the day before we we left, with forecast for more snow overnight, but we woke to bare roads so we were off.  Traffic was light and road conditions were great until about Lytton when it got really windy, not great for hauling a trailer.

We were a little concerned about our plan to set up at the RV park in Fort Langley as they were not answering their phones on the weekend. But we were able to drive in and get a spot. It was not busy in the winter but they were sponsoring a superbowl party in the rain complete with chili.

Not for us though. We were invited to watch the superbowl in Kitsilano so we set the trailer up and drove into Vancouver in the dark and rain in time to watch the last quarter.  Go Chiefs.  Not a fan at all but I do know one superfan!

Spent a day with our friends.  In the afternoon the wind blew up and we walked down to the beach to witness the big waves roll in and the dramatic sky.  Raining over on the North Shore, of course.

After a takeout meal of our favorite industrial strength sushi (super sized, super cheap), we drove back to the trailer to get ready for tomorrow's border crossing.