Shabbos was nice and cool but quite windy.  At night, we had a campfire and burned off most of the ocotillos the kids had harvested:

This morning we packed up the RV, said goodbye to our great campsite for the last 10 or so days, and drove north a few miles to the site of the ghost town of Tumco.  The Tumco area has been a mining site from the 1600s until as recently as the 1990s.  The BLM has produced an interpretive walk though the ghost town, which was had its peak in the late 1800s.  Our first stop was the cemetery:

Every ghost town has a can dump:

The basement of the miner’s club is all that remains of the structure:

Only portions of one wall remain of the 40 by 40 foot hospital building:

A demolished brick building:

This is the site of the stamp mill for the town.  In 1896, a 100 stamp mill was built here, which cost $200,000 at the time:

Cyanide vats on the hill, used to extract gold from ore:

The vats are now full of sand:

We left Tumco and drove north to Blythe.  We hadn’t dumped our sewer tanks in the last 17 days or so, so we visited a county park and emptied our tanks.  We then continued a bit north of town to the site of Blythe Intaglios, a series of large human and animal figures carved into the ground by pushing aside the patina-covered rocks that cover the ground.  The intaglios are thought to be approximately 1000 years old.  The largest figure is over 170 feet tall:

The first figure we visited as seen from the air:

Here’s a ground level photo from the feet side:

And from the head:

Our second visited figure is the largest here:

This one has an animal alongside it:

Cactus here have these small “fruits” sticking out, probably because of the recent rains:

We met a couple walking around here.  The woman told us she knew a good bit about Native American rock tools, and she was pretty sure that this stone was chipped for use as a tool:

We visited the third set of intaglios on the was back to the RV:

This figure also had a companion animal:

There’s also a spiral shape here:

Leaving the intaglios, we drove back to Blythe and East to Quartzsite to overnight.  We camped very close to the place we camped last time we were here.  B shared with us a rule book she made for herself.  I guess she’s been listening:

See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.

I found out today that my PPG buddy Greg is coming out to the area for the weekend.  Greg likes to camp near the dunes so he can drive around in his RZR.  I offered to check out Ogilby campground, which is the dune field campground nearest to where we are camping.  Perhaps calling it a “campground” is a bit generous, but at least there’s plenty of room to take off:

The dunes start about 100 yards beyond the campground:

Down here, all of the BLM land on the West side of Ogilby Road is in the BLM’s use fee area for the dunes.  Once a vehicle is parked, it can be ticketed if it doesn’t have a $35 per week or $150 per year pass.  For the first mile or so along the access road on the way to the campground, there are a few private inholdings.  One of them has a mobile home on site, and there’s a sign welcoming folks to “Geezertown”.  For a donation of one’s choosing, an RV can be parked here on the 160 acre private parcel, which avoids both the BLM fee and the two week camping limit on BLM land.  The land owner, who lives in the mobile home, also operates a mobile RV sewage and fresh water service.  He also fills propane canisters.  Clever!

Today was very windy and also cool, with highs in the low 70s.  Towards sunset the shadows lengthened:

I’m hoping that winds are calm tomorrow morning and I can get in a flight.

Today was another windy day in the desert, but again we had great clouds:

B did a science experiment which found that a soap solution with plaster of paris in it bubbled less than one without plaster of paris:

Trish put together a work involving matching countries in Europe with their flags:

While B worked on Europe, M worked on one of his short stories in his writing class:

Shabbos was nice here, the temperature was just a bit on the warm side of perfect. A BLM Ranger stopped by to make sure we knew about the 14 day camping limit rule. She said they do have a problem with people staying longer, which may explain why we see most of the RVs here parked on private land whose owner isn’t local and/or doesn’t care about squatters.

Last night was very windy, I got up at 3am to bring down the windsock lest it be torn apart.

Today continued to be windy, so sadly there was no flying today. The change in weather did bring interesting clouds:

Towards sunset, the kids and I went for a bike ride: