Sunday September 24th 2017

When I got up this morning it was 55 degrees in the motorhome. It was afternoon before the temperature got above 70. The high for the day was only around 75 degrees, and there wasn’t much wind at all. Overall, it was a great weather day.

I stumbled on the Patriots vs. Texans football game on TV this morning at 10am. For a guy that lived the first sixty years of life in the Eastern Time Zone, spending so much time on the west coast is confusing sometimes. As a child of the television age I am used to having it on all the time and to a certain extent depending on it for knowing the time of day. Here on the west coast live events occurring when they do continue to surprise me.

This is the first Patriots game I’ve been able to see this year. I was without access to an NBC affiliate for the season kickoff game and last week the local Arizona Cardinals got the focus. The Texans and their rookie Quarterback, Deshaun Watson, was more than the Patriots were prepared to handle for much of the game. In the end Tom Brady completed one of his patented LMD (Last Minute Drives). Go Pats!

This seemed to be the day for late game heroics. After the Patriots game I switched to the Giants vs. Eagles game. That one ended with a 61 yard field goal by the Eagles as time expired to win the game. The next game I caught was the Cincinnati vs. Green Bay game. It ended in overtime with a Green Bay field goal after Arron Rodgers got them to overtime with his own LMD.

I really enjoyed a day of watching football. In between games I got out for another short hike. I went to another area of Verde River access. This area contained a side channel of the main river that is blocked at this time of year forming a murky pond. The trail descends the cliffs along the river bank to an area along the side of the water. Signs warn that the area is susceptible to flash floods and may be flooded at high water times of the year.

Murky water in this captured part of the Verde River

Steep cliffs line the shore.

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Saturday September 23rd 2017

I guess Fall weather is here. The temperature only got into the 70s today and some of the higher elevations around here have a freeze warning for tonight. I thought it was a very comfortable day.

I started reading during breakfast and didn’t come up for air so to speak until afternoon. The sun got around to the west side of my RV home and started to warm things up. I moved outside and continued reading. It wasn’t a reading a great novel, just random articles on the internet. It was just a lazy day.

Roadrunner

While I was outside, I had a visitor entertain me. A Roadrunner came across the road into my site. It was feeding on the many grasshoppers in the area. The bird was aware of me, but wasn’t real worried about me. If I moved quickly it would run a few feet away and resume its lunch. The bird hung around for almost half an hour until a truck came down the road. The Roadrunner then ran down the road away from the truck.

Looking down my campground road.

The campground is just about full this weekend. You can tell that these are campers not travelers by the amount of “stuff” they get out and setup. Tomorrow they’ll pack it all up and head home. In all the years that I was a weekend camper I never got into the setup and spread out approach. Just the stuff necessary for a short duration stay went with me. The kitchen sink stayed home.

Friday September 22nd 2017

As predicted, today was a cooler and windy day. The temperature only made it up to about 80 degrees. My leisurely stay at home approach to my visit in this area continued. I took advantage of the cooler weather to take a longer hike in the open desert area. I took plenty of water and a few provisions in my pack. When I feel like I’m prepared I can get ambitious. Today was no exception.

Cactus on the side of the trail.

Trail heading up the hill.

View of the Verde valley behind the yellowing desert bush.

I left my RV home and headed north up the hill. I continued on the trail past the boundary of the state park into the Coconino National Forest and kept climbing. At the top of the hill it leveled out at a cattle gate. I decided to turn back. If I continued on I’d either have to go down the far side and continue on for about three miles before intersecting with a 5 plus mile long trail back. It was too late in the day for that long a trek.

I was almost back to the trail head when that ambition associated with being prepared kicked in. I decided to take a branch trail to a different trail head. I only had a vague idea where that trail head was located. I knew I could always reverse direction. The new trail seemed to keep turning the wrong way. It went down through a dry wash and climbed out well to the west of the campground. I finally found a path back in the direction of the campground. When I finally returned to my RV home I approached it from the south. The last part of the hike was a big loop to the west and south.

Tuzigoot National Monument; an ancient hilltop pueblo.

Looking back up the trail that has been eroded by weather and dirt bicycles.

Valley view

All of the trails I was on are used by hikers and bicycles. Some of the trails in the park are also used by horses. Watching out for droppings on the trails shared with the horses is a necessity. I didn’t see any horses, but did see one pair of hikers on the trail. The campground has filled up for the weekend so I suspect the trails will be much busier tomorrow.

Thursday September 21st 2017

I’m really enjoying the slower pace here at Dead Horse Ranch State Park. I don’t have a National Park drawing my curiosity all the time like I had through most of August and early September. It was another gorgeous day with a little more wind than the last few. I stayed home all day.

Part of the Verde River

One of the retention ponds in the park.

This morning I worked on travel planning. Since I decided not to spend time in Texas this winter, I’ve been struggling to figure out plan B. The Texas plan had me working my way east out of Arizona during the first half of October. Instead I’ll be staying in Arizona or Nevada for the first half of the winter. I know I can find a place to stay in the Phoenix area south to the Tuscon area, but I’d prefer to stay in another area. While I figure that out, I’ve made reservations in central Arizona through the middle of October. Finishing up with a weekend at the RV park in Grand Canyon National Park.

Bird (kind?) standing in the water.

Another view of a holding pond.

The other major activity of the day was a hike down near the Verde River in the state park. The area is so different from the desert land that surrounds my campsite, but it’s less than half a mile away. The area has many trees, birds and lots of grasshoppers. I walked from my site to the river area then along the river to the retention ponds the state park has constructed. At other times of the year the path would have been under water. The ponds are the real star of this park. They have been stocked with fish and are an oasis in the desert.

Ducks in the retention pond.

Desert north of the ponds.

When I got back to my site I had new neighbors. The park is starting to fill up for the weekend. It has been about half full during the week. My neighbors are camping in a horse trailer without the horses and a tent. It looks like the grandparents have the trailer and the three grand kids and their parents get the tent. The part of the trailer intended for horses got emptied of a sporting goods store full of paraphernalia. Everything from folding tables to the kids bikes came out. The tent is practically under my window.

Wednesday September 20th 2017

Today’s weather was a repeat of the last couple of days. It was a day with full sunshine, breezy and a high temperature around 90 degrees. When I get up in the morning it is cool in the sixties and by the time I go to bed the temperature has returned to a comfortable level. The wind is forecast to pickup tomorrow as a cold front moves through the area.

Somewhere near the top of one of those mountains is Jerome AZ.

I spent the morning reading with the TV on as background noise. I can’t really get into the locally (Arizona) produced morning programs. It seems like all of the major TV channels have a show featuring one to three local personalities talking about local and national feature stories. I can’t get interested in the new chef at the local fine cuisine restaurant pr chiropractic advice for school kids carrying back packs. There are so many of similar programs that I think they’re digging pretty close to the bottom of the barrel for interesting stories.

This afternoon I got around to taking my typical area familiarization drive. I drove through the historic downtown of Cottonwood out to the town of Clarkdale and then up the mountain to Jerome. The entire area owes its existence to the establishment of copper mines in Jerome around 1870. Clarkdale at the base of the mountain was the site of the smelting operation and Cottonwood was established as a non-company town in the early 1900s. The mining operation ended in the early 1950s. Providing cement for the construction of the Glen Canyon dam in the early 1960s followed by tourism has saved the area.

The downtown area of Cottonwood looks like an attempt to maintain a snapshot of what the community looked like in first half of the last century. Shops in buildings constructed in the Spanish influenced style of the southwest line both sides of the street. The seem to contain a mixture of tourist related shops and ordinary shops needed by the citizens of the area. The bypass route contains all of the big box stores and franchise restaurants.

The most interesting town was Jerome. It is near the top of a mountain called Cleopatra Hill. To get there the road makes two or three switchbacks and climbs around 1600 feet from the elevation of Cottonwood and Clarkdale. The roads through town are narrow and pedestrian filled. Tourism is the primary business of the town now. I didn’t stop today, but will probably go back to visit the old mine areas and other attractions.

In the other directions from Cottonwood are Sedona and Camp Verde. I’ll check out those in the days ahead.

Tuesday September 19th 2017

The temperature got down into the 50s overnight, but was back into the high 80s this afternoon. That pattern is forecast to continue until the Thursday. Then a cold front will pass through that will drop the temperatures ten degrees or so. It isn’t going to rain so any temperature is fine.

If I were at Disney World, I’d say this was a hidden Mickey. Here it’s just another cactus along the trail.

Today was a shopping day in town. The Home Depot, Walmart and Safeway were easy to find. I had actually passed them on my way into town on Sunday. The only place I actually bought anything was Walmart and that was mostly groceries. I stopped at Home Depot to look for a portable gas grill to replace mine. I’ve known it was on its last legs since last fall. It is finally reached a condition that impacts how it cooks food. Home Depot is pushing the big backyard units and didn’t have much of a selection in the portable size. I’m going to have to look at camping and sporting goods stores, or order online when I’m in one location long enough.

Shopping in Walmart today was a long slow process. I entered on the home goods side and wandered through everything else before I got to the grocery section at the opposite end of the store. I picked up a couple of things, but my cart was still pretty empty when I got to the grocery section.

Now that I’m back in Arizona some of the brands are more familiar. From my experience, the distribution chain that supplies the Walmarts in Utah, Idaho and Montana is different from Arizona. Today I even found a can of B&M baked beans. Something I haven’t seen since I left New England.

This Walmart had a manager that liked to use the public address system. He kept calling for some poor husband to meet his wife in the produce department. It was repeated so many times I started to think it was a code. The next series of announcements was calling for all available cashiers to the checkouts. By the time I got ready to checkout most of the registers were staffed, but the lines were still four and five deep. I didn’t see that many people in the store. It took twenty minutes from the time I got in line to the time I reached my car. I’m still not sure what was really going on in the store.

Sunset out my front door.

My leisurely approach to shopping combined with Walmart’s not so speedy checkouts, took up three hours of my day. By the time I got the food back to my RV home, it was too late to do anything significant. I settled for another walk along the trails in the state park.

Monday September 2017

It was a breezy day with temperatures in the high 80s today. There wasn’t a cloud visible in the sky all day. Knowing that I have two weeks in the area, allow or possibly compelled me to stay at home today. I used the day to get familiar with the Dead Horse Ranch State Park.

The park is on the hill side on the north side of the Verde River Valley above the town of Cottonwood AZ. There are a few trees, but it is mostly high desert open range land. There are many trails around the park and out of the park in the Coconino National Forest. I hiked a few of the shorter ones today.

My RV as seen from one of the hills in Dead Horse Ranch State Park.

There were some good views of the campground and the town from the higher ground. I kept an eye out for wildlife, but didn’t see anything bigger than a grasshopper. Even the birds were hiding from me. The area looks like it should support deer, elk or whatever the bigger hoofed animals are in this area. I’ll need to look early or late in the day for a better chance at seeing something interesting.

View from one of the hills in Dead Horse Ranch State Park.

Civilization in the distance. 

It is nice to be back in a campground closer to nature than town. The chance of seeing animal life is always nice and the night is dark enough that the stars really pop. Even though I’ve been visiting a lot of national parks this summer, I’ve usually stayed in nearby towns and driven into the parks. The lights of the towns make the night sky harder to see.

When I started this Rambling Road Trip, I thought I’d be staying in more state parks and natural places away from towns. What I’ve found is the need to understand access for my RV and the requirement to plan ahead make finding place matching my desire hard. I knew about this place from reading blog posts by other full time RVers. I’ve been keeping notes on good places that other people have written about and that I’ve scouted out in the areas I’ve traveled. That means that the over time it may get easier to find campgrounds that are more in my preferred

Sunday September 17th 2017

Today was a rare Sunday travel day. I prefer to travel in the middle of the week, but I wasn’t paying attention to the day of the week when I made my current reservation. I was looking for a two week stay and the first opportunity happened to fall on a Sunday. So I packed up and got on the road with all of the RVers returning home from the weekend. I’ll have another Sunday of travel in two weeks when I move on from here.

I had lots of little issues on today’s journey. First the wind was a problem in the wide open areas east of Flagstaff AZ. It was a quartering wind that caused issues when a gust came through. I traveled into the rumble strip on the side of the breakdown lane a few times before I caught it and eased back into the lane. The ninety or so miles from Holbrook to Flagstaff was mostly up hill. I traveled from around five thousand feet in elevation to over seven thousand in the Flagstaff area. Uphill into the wind meant using more gas.

Site 95 in the Cooper’s Hawk area of the Dead Horse Ranch State Park.

I stopped for gas and had more little issues in the RV lanes. A motorhome that had finished fueling was parked at the pumps that filled on the drivers side. I waited for ten minutes and they never moved. When the next lane over emptied out, I moved over to it. This lane had remote filling nozzles on the drivers side with the main pump on the passengers side. I’ve used the remote fills before, but don’t really like them. Unfortunately, this time they weren’t working. A fact that I learned after I’d swiped my credit card and got authorization to pump. I tried to stretch the passenger side hose to my fill location on the driver side rear of the coach. It didn’t make it on the first try. After moving the motorhome ahead a foot I got it to work at maximum stretch. If anyone was watching it must have been a real show. The people in the motorhome blocking the other lane weren’t watching. When I was almost finished they came strolling back from the store.

The gas station saga continued when the machine didn’t print a receipt. I use them to keep track of gallons pumped and cost. I had to grab a piece of paper from the RV to write down the pertinent information, but I forgot two things. First I didn’t write down the mileage and second I forgot to put the cap back on the fuel tank. Forgetting to right down the mileage isn’t a big deal, I just can’t calculate how bad the wind and the uphill climb impacted my miles per gallon. The cap issue I discovered on a walk around at a rest area sixty or so miles later. It was still attached by its plastic lanyard. So I dodged that issue too.

The last part of the trip was downhill from the seven thousand foot level of Flagstaff to around 3500 in the Verde Valley home of Cottonwood AZ. Most of that elevation lose is in less than 20 miles on Interstate 17. I don’t look forward to climbing back up the mountain in two weeks.

I’m at the Dead Horse Ranch State Park in Cottonwood AZ for the next two weeks. The park got its name from its previous owner in the late 1940s. When looking for property they found this parcel with a large dead horse in the road. It seemed like an appropriate name for the ranch when they bought the land. So far I haven’t seen any horses alive or otherwise.

Saturday September 16th 2017

The temperature got down to the low fifties overnight. I guess fall is coming. The daytime temperature has recovered to the low 80s with a good breeze. I didn’t work up the ambition to do much more than puttering around the RV today. I’ve been working on pictures and getting ready to travel tomorrow.

You don’t have to go to a National Park to see petrified wood. This log is on display in the campground.

I have close to 3500 pictures in eleven Google Photo Albums. Digital cameras are wonderful. I can take picture after picture and not run out of film or go broke. Many of the better images I wouldn’t of even thought about wasting film and with the digital camera I can take multiple shots of significant things to get more chances at a better outcome. During the last month and half I’ve taken more than the 3500 pictures in the albums. Some pictures were just bad and others were images from day to day happenings that aren’t easily groupable into albums. They are also probably only of interest to me. As it is, I’ll be amazed if any of my readers actually look at all of my pictures. Just in case your interested, here they are:

• Arches National Park
• Canyonlands National Park
• Capitol Reef National Park
• Cedar Breaks National Monument
• Bryce Canyon National Park
• Zion National Park
• Zion National Park Kolob Canyon
• Lake Powell and the Rainbow Bridge National Monument
• Glen Canyon Raft Trip
• Grand Canyon National Park North Rim
• Petrified Forest National Park

Tomorrow I move on to Cottonwood Arizona.

Friday September 15th 2017

I can’t believe September is half gone. It was a nice day in this part of Arizona. The temperature topped out in the 80s, but the wind continued to blow. Yesterday’s wind was worse, but tolerable here. In the Lake Powell area where I was until Wednesday there was a micro burst that swamped a few houseboats and other water craft. I guess I moved on at the right time.

After the busy day touring the Petrified Forest National Park on Thursday, I stayed at home today. I had a number of chores to get caught up on and a couple to get a head start on. When I move on Sunday, I’ll be going to a State Park without a sewer connection and probably no laundry. To prepare for my two weeks at the State Park, I flushed the holding tanks and did the laundry. I’ll flush the tanks one more time before I go on Sunday. With respect to the laundry I should be alright for clean clothes with the start of cooler weather I will be wearing a wider variety of clothes. If not, I’ll find a laundry in town.

The pictures in this blog entry are from yesterday’s tour of the Petrified Forest National Park. I’ve included a few more close-ups of petrified logs. One of the other tasks I have been working on today is uploading all of the pictures from the last month and a half. As soon as I’m finished I’ll publish the links to the albums in a blog entry.

Painted Desert Lodge National Historic Landmark.

Blue Mesa

Petrified log pile

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Petrified Log exposed on path

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Sections of petrified logs scattered across the area

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Longer section of petrified log

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Petrified log along the side of the path

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End of blog entry on the Petrified Forest National Park.