Boondocking – Page 4 – On the Road with Dan & Amy

Anza Borrego Desert State Park

Clark Dry Lake BLM

After boondocking for 5 days outside of Joshua Tree National Park, we moved southwest about 80 miles and setup for more boondocking in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. We met up with our friends, Jim and Corinne, who were just finishing up a stay at this interesting park in southern California. One of the unique attractions in this area is the collection of sculptures scattered through out the desert. The most popular sculpture has to be the serpent that spans the road north of town. We also enjoyed the giant bird feeding its babies a snake. The various dinosaur sculptures were also very interesting. The level of detail was amazing!

Joshua Tree NP

Joshua Tree South BLM

iPhone picture of the flowers near our RV

We spent five days boondocking on BLM land just outside the south entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. The park is fairly large and most of the interesting stuff, like the Joshua Trees themselves, is located at the north end of the park a good 45 minutes to an hour drive away. Camping for free this close to a national park makes the drive into the attractions a non-issue. When we arrived and looked for a spot to setup we drove along the dirt road heading west for about a mile and did not find an appropriate location. Turning the rig around to head back out was a bit challenging and a little nerve wracking. As we got close to the main road we noticed an area that looked pretty decent so we got ourselves setup there and were ready for our first solo boondocking experience.

Boomerville, Week 2

Quartzsite, AZ

Dry wash that was full of water last week

The desert has pretty much recovered from the rain we had on our first full day in the desert and so has our power generation. By mid-afternoon of day 9, our batteries reached 100% state of charge and easily returned to fully charged each day after that. As the days become longer and the sun gets higher in the sky, we will be having power to spare during the day. When we hooked up to leave on day 14, our fresh water tank was at 18% and both the grey and black tanks were around 60%. We exercised extreme water conservation and this experience shows us that we can boon dock 2 weeks but if we are only going a week or so, we can relax some of our restrictions with water usage.

Boomerville, Week 1

Quartzsite, AZ

We have completed our first week of a two week stay on BLM land north of the small town of Quartzsite, AZ. This is dry camping with no hookups of any kind; no water, no electricity and no sewage hookup. You need come in with your fresh water tank full (ours holds 100 gallons) and a strategy for generating whatever electricity you need. That is where the solar panels and lithium ion batteries we installed in December come in. We aren’t here alone by any stretch of the imagination. We are with a subgroup of the Escapees RV club known as Boomers. I have no idea where the name came from. We are also here with long time friends, Jim and Corinne and new friends, Paul and Kay. Jim and Corinne met Paul and Kay on the road a few years ago and continue to meet up as often as possible. In addition to our group of Boomers, currently over 180 rigs and counting, there are an estimated 100,000 or more (some say upwards of 500,000) RVs boondocking in the desert surrounding Quartzsite these two weeks of January. Needless to say, we are not alone.