Thursday January 18th 2018

It was a sunny warm day in the low seventies after a cool overnight in the forties. It’s amazing how much difference one hundred seventy five miles south from Las Vegas and fifteen hundred feet lower in elevation makes.

Mountains surrounding the campground

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East side mountain at sunset.

There are many other nice differences about this location over Las Vegas. The one that struck me first was how quiet it was last night. In Las Vegas there was noise all day and night. Everything from basic traffic noise to sirens of every type. A couple of evenings we even had low flying police helicopters working a grid search pattern over the area. Most of the noise was to be expected in a city RV resort, but the police helicopters were a bit disconcerting. It was so nice to experience the quiet here last night.

California side of the river

Flock of birds that floats down the river then flies back upstream to float down again.

Who’s going to win the race the birds or the boat?

During the day it was a little noisier. The traffic on the nearby road picked up and some of the trucks were loud enough to draw my attention. An occasional fast moving boat on the Colorado river reminded me that the river was there. So there was occasional noise on south and north sides. The east and west sides were mountain cliffs. That left the sky as an additional source of potential noise. The military and a few private pilots provided the noise from that direction. During the morning three attack helicopters made a training run up the Colorado river at a low altitude. Later in the morning a couple of fighter aircraft flew by. Thankfully they were at a higher altitude than the choppers. The private planes flew over at random times during the day. These were all interesting noises. The Las Vegas ones were just annoying and somewhat frightening.

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Couples going their separate ways

Quick out of focus picture of one of the attack helicopters that flew up the river valley at low altitude.

I spent the day enjoying the park and watching the activity on the river. There were quite a few kayaks and a few power boats on the river. They were at opposite ends of the speed spectrum. All of the power boats were traveling at or near full throttle judging by the noise level, the wake and the speed. Luckily for the kayaks they weren’t around at the same time as the power boats.

The bird population on the river was also in full display. I’m not great at bird identification, but I learned what an American Coot looks like while in Las Vegas. Now I’m seeing them here. There were also several other varieties of water birds. I haven’t gotten a good picture or enough internet access to attempt an identification. Perhaps tomorrow.