Hello, Everybody,                  27 February 2007

After escaping the Colorado/Nebraska blizzards in late December,
I've had a great couple of months mostly in shorts and tee-shirt
weather. While at the Bosque del Apache in early January, I got a
call on my cellphone from Audrey and Ray McMullen, my camping
friends from Michigan; I knew they were heading south to winter in
Baja California, but was surprised and excited when they said they
were also at the Bosque and thought they had seen my truck earlier
in the day. We had a great reunion and decided to team up for a
few days, heading down into Arizona on their way to Baja, and
messing with camper battery systems and Photoshop and birding as
we went along. I had great repeat birding visits at Whitewater Draw
and Buenos Aires NWR, and when Ray and Audrey took off for Baja, I
headed down the El Camino del Diablo for the third time, spending
11 days en route rather than 3 or 4 as on my earlier trips. In that time I
saw just one civilian vehicle! Of course many, many Border Patrol
trucks, which are a bit intrusive in that wild and isolated setting, but it
would be even worse if they just closed the road. I often saw them
'tire dragging' to smooth the sand so they can then return to look for
footprints crossing the road. 

Heading into southeast California near Yuma, I then spent a great 3
weeks exploring backroads and jeep trails in the Mojave Desert - - a
very mountainous desert, not at all flat or sand dunes like one thinks
of the Sahara. I have three 'off road' guidebooks for southern
California, which made it easy to pick out a linked route of the most
scenic and not too difficult 'trails'. 

One unusual area was the Trona Pinnacles, which has been the
setting for several movies (Planet of the Apes, for one). They were
formed by carbonates erupting from cracks in the bottom of a lake
several hundred feet deep, precipitating out and growing
impressively high pinnacles. 

I continued a little farther north and spent 10 days in the Death
Valley area , much of it included in Death Valley National Park, the
largest outside Alaska. The Valley is the centerpiece of the Park, with
tourist attractions like sand dunes and 280 feet below sea level
elevation, but it's only perhaps 10 percent of the area, and to my
mind what is so great are the mountains and canyons surrounding
the major valleys (Death Valley, Panamint Valley, Saline Valley), with
many truck and jeep roads. Some of the mountain views are great,
and there are a lot of beautiful rock formations in the canyons. A
couple of times I was up to 7,000 and 8,000 feet (a long climb up
from zero feet!), and although I encountered a few inches of snow
on the shady sides, it was not slippery or deep enough to be a
problem. I had some fun with my friend Mark Silver's AllTopo
mapping program, and Photoshop, to display my GPS track, and
was pretty pleased with how it came out. But I need a faster
computer! It took 45 minutes to hill-shade the Death Valley map
(which was pieced together from several smaller maps with Mark's
BigTopo). 

One curiosity was the goldfish at China Garden near Darwin: around
1870, Chinese laborers had a settlement near the mines there, and
with the water from a little spring grew vegetables which they sold to
the miners, and apparently their traditional goldfish have survived
through many generations down to the present day. 

I am finicky about getting my camper level for the night, and have
been annoyed over the years by the boards I use under the tires,
sometimes slipping and sliding and collapsing, especially if they are
wet or snowy. After much thought and scheming, I think I have finally
found a good system, as shown in the photograph. And I've
adopted another major improvement from Ray and Audrey: their
camper has two little bubble levels mounted on a corner, which is
much better than my system with a bubble level mounted inside my
camper. I used to have to hop out, walk to the back, get the ladder
down, climb up and open the door and try to see the bubble level
clearly, then back down, put up the ladder, walk forward, and hop
back in the cab for the next iteration. I put two levels at the corner
just behind the cab, so it's now just hop out, look, hop back in. For
five years I've been suffering!

One major tourist attraction is The Racetrack, a flat smooth dry lake
which has tracks on the surface, apparently left by rocks mysteriously
moving along - - nobody has ever seen a rock in motion, but the
speculation is that strong winds can blow the rocks along when the
surface is slippery with mud. Race Track Road was a real shocker:
previously I'd been seeing about one truck every 3 days, suddenly it
was 50 cars, trucks, and motorcycles in an hour! 

The Joshua Tree is to the Mojave Desert what the Saguaro is to the
Sonoran Desert, both seeming pretty exotic when first encountered.
It's interesting to see how the 'bark' of the Joshua Tree changes with
age and size: it starts out looking somewhat like a yucca, and ends
up more like a 'real' tree.

Unlike in most National Parks, primitive camping is permitted as long
as you are at least 2 miles from a paved road or building, so on most
of the truck trails it's possible to find good campsites as you go
along. But near the headquarters and campground area in Death
Valley itself it's hard to find a permitted place, so a couple of times I
drove southeast out of the Park to get on BLM land which is
unrestricted. One morning as I was working on my truck, a guy in a
pickup truck stopped and asked how well I knew the area - - I said
not very well, but I had lots of maps. His hobby is searching out old
airplane wrecks, and he even had a thick book describing such
wrecks just in California. He had a lat/lon position for a nearby 1995
lightplane wreck, and when he'd looked on GoogleEarth it seemed
that right where we were was the starting point to drive up in the hills
to find it. We looked at it on my two computer mapping systems and
the Benchmark paper atlas, and after he headed up the road, I
decided I had plenty of time and this sounded like it might be
interesting, so I took a different way up to his position. Nothing there!
But about a mile away I could see a truck which looked like his, and
sure enough, he had spotted the wreck glinting in the sunlight as he
had also driven to the 'wrong' place. The destruction of the plane
was incredible, but he said this was the most intact of the dozen
wrecks he's seen. He turned out to be a nice guy, and interesting, a
policeman from the LA area, and I hope I might be able to see him
again someday. 

I've ben taking lots of scenery pictures along the way, as well as
birds, and have put them in to 2 separate slideshows, one for New
Mexico and Arizona, and one for California.

Here are the same old instructions for the slideshows:

http://www.firestardesign.com/johna 

(Note that this is still 'johna' in spite of my email address change to
be just 'john')

The new slideshows are 

07 Jan NM AZ.exe
07 Feb CA Desert.exe

Each browser is a little different, but generally you can either choose
OPEN to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK and then
OPEN if you want to have it your hard drive for future re-viewing. I
have used my updated PC-cillin to be sure the .exe file is virus free,
so you can safely ignore Windows's warning about 'dangerous
<.exe> files'. 

Right-Arrow or Right-Click will advance to the next picture.
Left-Arrow or Left-Click will return to the previous picture.
Esc will end the show at any time; use Esc if the show ever seems
stuck.

If you don't have a high-speed Internet connection it's not realistic
to download these large files on a phone line   please let me know,
as it is very easy for me to send them to you on a CD. And if you
would like any of the individual images, just let me know. I have
limited space on firestardesign.com, so must sometimes remove
older slideshows to put up new ones; let me know if you want me to
send you a CD of any of the 'back issues', or of all of them from
2004-2007 along with their accompanying eMails, on CDs. And if you
don't want to get any more eMails like this one in the future, just let
me know. If you have friends who might be interested, I'll be happy
to add them to my eMail list.      

Regards, John Armitage