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Camping & Hiking Around Phoenix, AZ
After Christmas with our family, we beelined to Arizona on an unoriginal route for us, I-20, even spending nights in mostly unoriginal locations along the way. It’s not my favorite drive, simply because this is the 3rd time we’ve done it. But, it’s the most direct from NC, and it avoids most winter weather issues we could have this time of year. I’ve had a couple of campgrounds near Phoenix on my radar and we were excited to be back in the land of the saguaros, yet exploring a part of Arizona we have not spent much time in. We made it to our first weeklong destination, McDowell Mountain Regional…
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Red Rocks & Sacred Sedona
Sedona is in Arizona’s high desert at 4300ft elevation so it can be pretty cold at night during the winter. When the weather looked good, there was no question whether we should spend the week there. We found a great boondocking spot on Forest Rd 525 in the Coconino National Forest, 15 miles outside of Sedona. Despite the fact that it took 20 minutes to drive 4 bumpy miles to the main road every time we wanted to leave, it was one of our favorite campsites so far! Sedona is a small busy tourist town, even in the off-season. In some places, like Devil’s Bridge, there was a line for…
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Glen Canyon & Lake Powell
We spent a warm and sunny first week of April at Lone Rock Beach on Lake Powell, a man-made reservoir on the Colorado River created by the Glen Canyon Dam, that straddles the Arizona/Utah border. This sprawling lake and land to the north are part of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The land south belongs to the Navajo Nation. I’m happy to report that we never got stuck. However, we watched other people get stuck multiple times every day and that was equally entertaining and horrifying. During his explorations, John Wesley Powell named Glen Canyon for the now legendary glens, grottoes, and sandstone formations he saw carved into this…
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Lee’s Ferry & The Colorado River
We didn’t even realize how much we were missing the sight and sounds of water until we got to the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry at the end of March. Upstream from this point is Glen Canyon, the Glen Canyon Dam, and Lake Powell. Downstream is 277 river miles of the Grand Canyon. Lee’s Ferry is also where rafting trips that travel through the Grand Canyon are launched, and after watching groups leave all week, now we want to go! Our RVing adventure was supposed to check things off of our travel list, but instead, we keep adding to it. We stayed at Lee’s Ferry Campground for a week, at…
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Route 66 To The Grand Canyon
With Spring just about to spring, we decided to try our luck with good weather at the south rim of the Grand Canyon. At 7400ft, we knew it was a gamble, but the Grand Canyon is worth gambling on. From Joshua Tree to the spot we had picked out for boondocking was 6 1/2 “Google Maps” hours which was more than we like. Wanting to break up the trip with a laundry and grocery stop, we stayed at Fort Beale RV Park in Kingman, AZ for a week. The following Sunday, we packed up and continued on. From obsessively checking the weather, we were expecting 1-3 inches of snow on…
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More Arizona Desert Dwelling
With our wheels pointed in the general direction of Joshua Tree National Park in California, we decided to make two more stops in Arizona along the way. We split a week between two different locations near Gila Bend, a town without a grocery store. First, at the Painted Rock Petroglyph Site and Campground, managed by the BLM. For a “campground”, the amenities were sparse – only a vault toilet and dumpster, but with our interagency pass, it was a bargain at $4 per night. And, it’s an ancient archeological site with hundreds of petroglyphs! Petroglyphs (images etched on rocks) from ancient cultures are found all over the world. These particular…
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Ajo, AZ & Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument
From Tucson, we made our way further into the heart of the Sonoran Desert. We had some BLM boondocking land chosen a couple of miles south of the tiny town of Ajo, Arizona, on Darby Well Road. This location would put us within a half-hour drive to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Ajo, a former mining town, is surrounded by millions of acres of federal land (BLM, NPS, and the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge) and the tribal land of the Tohono O’odham Nation. And, what seemed like millions of Border Patrol agents. The area got even more scenic further down the road, which of course negatively correlated with cell…
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Tucson: Outdoor Edition
After leaving our newly beloved first boondocking site at Las Cienegas NCA, we circled the city of Tucson for a few weeks. I say circled because we never really went to the city. When you are in the world’s Covid-19 hotspot while it is the hotspot, you don’t take any chances. Urban streets and museums went unexplored. Breweries and restaurants remained not visited. However, we did not waste any opportunity to enjoy the area’s parks and trails. Or to spend time with all our new cactus friends. Frenemies? We started out in the Tucson Mountains west of the city at Gilbert Ray Campground, inside Pima County’s Tucson Mountain Park. It’s…
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Boondocking at Las Cienegas & The Empire Ranch
Since I am not going to write a blog specifically about the end of 2020, I will just say that the year left us heartbroken because our Golden, Nala, needed to be euthanized on December 22. She had a pathological fracture and several indications that it was caused by bone cancer on x-ray. It was all of the sudden and we miss her like crazy. Right after Christmas and 6 weeks of being in NC for the holidays, we beelined across the country, wanting to take advantage of Michael’s time off from work for long drive days. After 2000 miles, four parking lot sleeps, and completely traumatizing the cat, we…
