4-Wheeling and camping in Arizona's western deserts with some rock hounding thrown in for good measure.
For many of my 4-wheeling and camping trips it has
been my custom to simply look at maps and find some dirt roads that I
have not traveled before, or take roads I have traveled before and
liked. Lately though I have been using guidebooks to get ideas for new
places to go.
For this trip I strung together several trips from my guidebooks. Most of my trips were taken from Backcountry Adventures Arizona by Peter Massey and Jeanne Wilson (abbreviated BAA), but one trip was from Guide to Arizona Backroads & 4-Wheel Drive Trails by Charles A. Wells.
Overview map showing the track logs from my gps.
Harquahala Mine Road.
I got off of I-10 at the Hovatter Road exit and first went to a gem and
mineral collecting site just south of the freeway. This is Site 49 in Gem Trails of Arizona
by James R. Mitchell. I did not do any digging, but just
wandered around to see what I could find, and that turned out to be not
much special -- some rocks with copper mineralization (very common in
Arizona) and a piece or quartz with a fairly well formed crystal
protruding. Following that it was on across the freeway to follow
the Harquahala Mine Road to Salome as described in BAA (Central trail
#11). This is a well maintained road that went past the remains
of the Harquahala Mine and a small cemetery just north of the mine.
I wandered the mine site and took some pictures there and of the
cemetery.
Granite Wash Mountains.
In Salome I topped up with gasoline (just in case) and the headed
west out of town on Hall avenue to start BAA Northwest Trail #4
that goes through an old mining district in the southern reaches
of the Granite Wash Mountains. There are many side roads in here,
and I began to pay close attention to the directions and coordinates in
BAA. On many occasions I had trouble finding agreement between my
gps and the coordinates listed in BAA, but the directions and mileages
carried me through without getting lost. This trail tested the
ground clearance of my stock 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee; that combined
with the fact that I was alone persuaded my not to take the spur trail
to the Glory Hole Mine which BAA rates as one level of difficulty
greater than the #4 trail I was following. Evening was
approaching as I left the canyons, so I found camp spot on the alluvial
fan below the Desert Queen Mine.
Four Peaks in the Plomosa Mountains.
(BAA Northwest Trail #1) I was on the dirt road by 9:30 A.M. and
shortly came to gem trail #44 which is the location for jasper and
botryoidal hematite. Since it was early I spent about an hour
wandering the low hills in the area. I found some red rock that I
take to be jasper, but could find no botryoidal hematite. So it goes.
A few miles later I passed near a mine close to the road. I
walked up to the shaft and noticed that it was angled into the ground
at the same angle as the rock layers in terrain just above the shaft.
While climbing around the rocks above the shaft I saw a rough
gray to gray-brown gnarled rock with linear crevices in parts of
it. This reminded me of dolomite I had seen in Death Valley and
surrounding areas. I took a piece of this rock home for testing
with acid. It fizzed readily with 1M HCl, so it is a carbonate,
and the rate of fizz indicates to me that it is more likely a limestone
than a dolomite. A little Google searching as I write this
reveals that limestone is known in the Plomosa Mountains, so I will go
with that. After leaving the mine, the route description and
coordinates in BAA were not matching my location and I was beginning to
fear that I was off the trail described in BAA. I was starting to
wonder about the accuracy of the coordinates in BAA some more.
Were they in NAD27 while I was using WGS84? A quick glance
through the book in some likely places did not mention the datum of the
points, so I kept on with WGS84 since that is the most commonly used
datum today. Then I came upon two couples, one on dirt bikes, the
other in a Rhino. They were stopped by the trail at the time so I
asked them about where I was. They were not familiar with BAA,
but they did know the trails in the area. From what they
described, I was on a major trail that would lead me in the direction I
wanted to go. Following on, I soon determined that I was back on
the BAA trail. The book mentions some sandy sections in the
southern part of the trail, but I was not too concerned at this point
because my Jeep had traversed soft sand readily before, I had lots of
gas for backtracking, and it was early in the day and I could camp
anywhere anyway. As I got to the sandy part I encountered
something that I had not expected; instead of just a light covering of
blow sand the sand was piled in fairly high ridges. Soon I came
to a ridge that was about 30-60 feet high and steeply inclined.
There was a wash with firm ground in it just my side of the sand
ridge, so I gunned it to pick up speed and proceeded on. About 2/3 of
the way to the top my momentum gave out and I came to a halt. I
was able to back down the slope without much problem, and then I looked
for a way around this spot, but found none. Then I contemplated
airing down the tires but decided not to do that, as I could just get
stuck in a place that would be hard to get out of. I was alone so
there was to one else to give me a tow if I did get stuck, so it might
be troublesome. Reluctantly I turned around. BAA Northwest
#1 intersects BAA Northwest #2 somewhere near where I had gotten off
the trail, and I decided add some variety to return trip by looking for
that intersection and taking part of BAA Northwest #2 toward my next
destination. Since I had been lost in this region, I entered a
waypoint into my gps with the coordinates of the intersection point and
headed for that. I had noticed a side road near where I
lost my way, so I decided to turn onto that and see if it took me to
the intersection point. Low and behold, it did! (With a
little back and forth in an area near the waypoint where I was
confused about which of the trails I found would most likely go closest
to my waypoint and the uncertainty about how close the book coordinates
were to actual locations on the ground.) Following Northwest #2
south and east to the paved Plomosa Road was uneventful.
When I got home I used my topo map program with my
track log loaded into it to figure out where I had gotten lost, and it
was when I left the mineshaft area.
The Bouse Fisherman. The Bouse Fisherman is a prehistoric intaglio (also called a geoglyph)
near the Plomosa Road about 4 miles south of the end of Northwest #2
and very short distance from the next trail I wanted to drive.
There is a large graveled pull-out at the parking spot for the
intaglio. The parking area is unsigned except for "No vehicle
travel allowed beyond this point" sign. A short walk down that
closed road brings one to the fenced intaglio. Here there are
some placards giving a brief description of the intaglio. For
more on this feature click here.
South Plomosa Mountains and the Southern Cross Mine.
Less than a 1/4 mile north of the intaglio parking area I started down
BAA Northwest Trail #3, and less than one mile into that trail I came
upon a large flat camping area that had not been too badly marred by
people. It was still 2 and 1/2 hours to sunset, but I decided to
camp here, as good camping spots might be hard to find as I got further
into the mountains.
Being early in camp I had plenty of time to sit down
have cocktail and peruse the BAA book to read about the trail #3 and
read the book at leisure looking for a mention of the datum of the
coordinates. On the third page of text there it was "NAD 1927";
the datum that USGS topographic maps use. I was hopeful that
changing the datum in my gps would now allow me to correlate my gps
positions with the book entries. In this part of Arizona the
NAD27 datum differs from WGS 84 primarily in longitude, and there the
difference it 0.046 minutes or about 200 meters. Since
selective availability was turned off in 2000, it is easy to
reproducibly know a location within several meters, so being off by 200
meters seemed like a lot.
Wondering near camp the next morning I found some rock alignments that might be prehistoric;
after all, this is pretty close to the Bouse Fisherman, so there was
probably a significant population here in prehistoric times. I
did not however find any other artifacts at this location that might
tend to confirm the prehistoric nature of the rock alignments.
The first item of interest along the trail was the Southern Cross Mine. Mining information can be found here.
One has to be careful exploring around here as there are open
shafts that could easily swallow an errant driver/rider. One is
at the crest of a hill; if one were to drive to the left side of the
road at the crest it could be down into the shaft. Some people have
place some miscellaneous trash on that side of the road to warn
drivers, but that is it. Also, on the road that leads to some of
the ruins, there is a steep shaft right at the side of the road.
Not a good place to stop and exit the vehicle. Continuing
my loop through the mountains I came to a couple of places where I was
glad I had figured out the datum issue on the coordinates in BAA.
As I was traversing these mountains it struck me that these
mountain ranges in this part of Arizona to not look like much when
viewed from a distance driving along a highway, but when you get into
them they can be quite extensive and complex. Get into the heart
of the range and all sorts of interesting terrain appears.
Dripping Springs Road.
After getting gas in Quartzsite I headed east on I-10 to follow
the road to Dripping Springs as described in the Wells book; trip #60.
Toward the beginning of this route I missed a turn out of a wash
and had to backtrack quite away. so my mileage was off in comparison to
the trip description in the book. I soon realized that it was
going to be hard to follow the route the rest of the way. This pointed
out a difference between BAA and the Wells book. BAA has an advantage
of 1)having more gps locations, 2) having more complete turn and
landmark descriptions, and 3) resetting the trip mileages every few
miles. If I were really determined to get to the end of this
trail I could have backtracked to known good location and compared my
odometer reading to the trip report odometer reading and done some
subtraction to figure out where the next turns were, but I just did not
feel like doing that and decided to just continue on and do my best to
head to the next coordinate location. I got to a place where I
did not like the character of the road any more. I looked around
and thought I could see where the next waypoint was, and there seemed
to be a good road leading to it, but I could not figure out how the
lousy road I was on make a connection with the road that seemed to
contain the waypoint. I decided to leave this for another day and
head for the next dirt road I wanted to travel.
Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. For
the final dirt drive of the trip I decided to visit a place I had
visited before and travel roads I had traveled before. At the
Vicksburg Road I headed south into the Kofa NWR and then a bit east to
pick up the Kofa Manganese Road. The desert along there seemed
more lush and green that what I had seen in the Plomosa Mountains.
I wanted to make camp around 5 PM, but at that time I was in a
pretty rugged part of the road without much in the way of good
campsites, and I knew that there were many good areas to camp along the
side of the road I would be traveling next, so I continued on
planning to camp at the first good place along the Red
Raven Road. This intersection can be easy to miss when
traveling south because the Red Raven Road comes in at an acute angle
from the north. I spotted the road first on my gps, and then I
saw the Refuge marker post. Without those clues, it would have
been easy to miss this intersection. Sure enough, in less
than 0.2 miles along the Red Raven Road I came to a great place to
camp. From there it was an easy but scenic drive back to the I-10
freeway via the Red Raven Road and Hovatter Road.
