This morning we drove to the Southwest corner of the park to visit Yaquitepec, Marshal South’s failed experiment in primitive living:

After a mile of steep climbing, we reached the site of Yaquitepec near the summit of Ghost Mountain.  It’s hard to believe that Marshal and Tanya carried 12 gallons of water at a time up to the site.  That’s 96 pounds of water!  There’s not much left of the house, which was abandoned over 60 years ago:

In the foreground, “the lake”, where rainwater was collected:

The cistern where water was stored:

The Yaquitepec sundial:

After we came down from Ghost Mountain, we drove back to The Slot, which we first explored a few days ago.  My parents enjoyed the hike through the slot canyon:

As we were leaving, a pair Ospreys passed over.  Here’s one of them:

After lunch, Trish took the kids to my parent’s hotel for swimming while I worked on the blog.  We had another beautiful sunset in Anza Borrego State Park!

We got off to an early start and drove East to Palm Wash.  We went looking for a pair of slot canyons with my parents:

The first slot canyon wasn’t all that narrow:

The slot eventually got pretty narrow:

Having explored the first slot, we hiked North to explore the second slot:

The second slot was short but nice:

It was interesting looking at an Ocotillo on the side of the trail:

After lunch, the kids went over to my parent’s hotel to swim.  I went out for a 30 mile ride up to the 3000’ level on Montezuma Grade:

We had my parents over for dinner.  Another great day!

Our homeschooling got off to a slow start today, which was OK since we were waiting for my parents to show up for a visit that will last for a few days.  We had a nice reunion in the RV before they headed off to their hotel of the night.

Tonight I replaced our oven pilot with the new one I had ordered and had shipped to my parents.  The old pilot, pictured below, wouldn’t stay lit, which made using the oven difficult.

Tomorrow we will go hiking with my parents.

Shabbos here was nice as usual.  Saturday night we played a rousing game of Settlers of Catan, and our daughter was victorious:

On Saturday afternoon, we saw a pair of powered hanggliders fly overhead.  Our daughter built a model:

This morning, we dumped our black water tank, which holds the toilet waste, into our “blue boy”, a 35 gallon wheeled plastic tank used to transport RV waste.  The idea is to save the hassle of packing up and hitching up the RV just to empty the RV’s tank.  Instead, we dump the RV tank into the blue boy and drive it to the dump station.

We set off at 25 MPH towards Borrego Springs.  The plan was to drive the 10 miles or so to the state campground and pay the $8 to use the dump station.  To make a long story short, it seems the wheels aren’t rated for even 25 MPH.  By the time we heard a dragging noise behind our SUV, the wheel hubs had melted and the wheels had disintegrated.  The blue boy was badly damaged and had to be thrown away.

Once in town, we returned books to the library, got gas and fresh water, did laundry, and shopped for groceries. Hopefully tomorrow won’t involve any expensive mistakes like today.

John and I went for a ride East on S-22 towards Salton Sea and back.  The wind was pushing us along at 30+ MPH on the way out.  We stopped at an overlook of the badlands at Ocotillo Wells:

On the way back we had to push our way through the same winds that pushed us along on the way out.  We took turns pulling at 12-15 MPH on the flats.  It was brutal.

Once I returned, I patched all of our flat tires.  We have a total of 14 wheels on the trip, as three of our four bikes have both road wheels and offroad wheels.  Of the 14 wheels, five had flats:

Yesterday afternoon we moved the RV closer to the main road.  Cell coverage was so bad in our old location that we had to walk a few hundred feet to make phone calls.  Amazingly, in our old location we were able to pull in 200kbps WiFi from 7.1 miles away, a new record for us.  In our new location, just 200 yards closer to the road, we can now see Borrego Springs in the distance, and we have great cell coverage and 800kpbs WiFi from 4.8 miles away.

Good Shabbos (again) form Anza Borrego State Park!