Our final five days of boondocking before returning to the civilization that is an RV park was spent at Gunsight Wash BLM, just south of Why, AZ. Yes, the town’s name is Why and I don’t know why. Once again we seem to be tracing the footsteps of our friends, Jim and Corinne. We arrived here the day before they planned to leave. One big advantage of this was Jim driving Dan around in their Jeep to find a good site to setup for the 5 days. As a result, we have been staying in what is probably our best boondocking site yet.
For dinner our first night here we cooked pizza out on the grill. Our friends joined us for the meal and each couple made a pizza to share. If you haven’t tried cooking pizza on a grill, you should. We first did this at Boomerville in Quartzsite and it has become a regular meal in our rotation. After we finished eating outside and started to put things away, a gorgeous sunset started to form. Dan took several pictures using a nearby tree as a foreground prop and also captured a nice shot of our site for this post’s featured image.
Visiting Organ Pipe Cactus NM
Given the forecast showing rain for Monday and Tuesday, we decided to go into the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on Sunday to do some hiking and check out the visitor’s center. The visitor’s center had a small nature hike with desert flowers and a variety of cactus and several educational plaques along the trail. Once we were done with the visitor’s center, we hiked the Victoria Mine trail, a 4.8 mile out and back hike to an old abandoned mine. We saw several organ pipe cacti as well as other desert plants along our way to the mine. There were several mine shafts which where cordoned off and the remains of an old stone building to mark the location of the mining settlement. After completing the hike, we decided to take the Ajo Mountain Drive, a 21 mile loop that is highlighted by desert landscapes and groves of organ pipe cacti. Even though our truck is quite heavy, riding down a dirt road can bounce the back end around and make for a very shaky ride!
Boondocking
Since we left the luxurious RV resort in Gold Canyon, AZ, we’ve boondocked all but 5 days. The first week was spent at the SARA rodeo grounds in Lake Havasu City for the Winter Blast Pyrotechnics show. That week cost us $150. We then went to an RV Resort for 5 days, 3 of which were free thanks to a coupon obtained at the Quartzsite RV show. Everyday since the 24th of February has been on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) public lands. All of these nights had zero cost to us. This is where we rely on the solar system we had installed back in December.
Above is a screenshot of the power generated by that system over the past 30 days. The bars that are not topped with a light blue segment indicate a day where the batteries did not get back to 100% and enter a float charging state. As mentioned earlier, the predicted rain for Monday and Tuesday (March 11th and 12th) did occur and when Wednesday morning came around the batteries were down to 55%. A bright sunny day with the sun getting higher in the sky was more than enough to bring the batteries back to 100%. That day set a new high of over 5 kWh of power generated and stored.
Solar rules!