I used to visit my aunt for a week about once a year. I got out of it cheap, I'd set up the vacation after traveling to San Jose on a business trip, drop out at Sky Harbor on the way back, rent a car and drive the 5 hours to Round Valley. One trip I put about 5500 miles on that rental car in a week! Lol! I've probably driven 40k miles in AZ in my lifetime. My aunt was a real character, we had a lot of fun roaming AZ. She pretty much drank me under the table in Tombstone! Think of driving around AZ seeing the sights with Phyllis Diller in the passenger seat ... We always had a great time. I miss her humor. I saw the desert floor in bloom one February or early March. Beautiful, and amazing given how it looks the rest of the year.
Lol, your aunt sounds like a lot of fun. Phyllis Diller, that’s great! Have an aunt by marriage named Phyllis in VA, she was pretty much a character too. Sounds like you got around good and in good style too! Yeah, this years winter rains were really good so hoping for a glorious and colorful spring in a month or so. It is amazing! Sunrise and sunset on the desert floor are just awesome anytime of year, but during a full on bloom it’s just mind blowing beautiful. I know there’s just as good and better on this ol’ rock, but this is where I hung my hat and have no regrets for it!
Do you use an ATV or jeep when prospecting? Or are you old school with mules and horses? I always thought an ATV would be great in the desert, but I don't know how damaging they might be given the delicate ecosystem. Hot and humid weather slows me down but I found hot and arid not bad up to 100F. A high school friend moved to San Diego almost 40 years ago. I flew out to spend a week and we did a big loop hitting the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Las Vegas, Death Valley and a number of areas north of San Diego. My most outrageous experience with hot, arid air was crossing Death Valley. We were in a 1978 Toyota Corolla with no AC, it was near 120F that day. We had the windows down and cooler packed with ice and sodas. Man was it hot!
Depends, most areas a 4x4 truck is just fine. A passenger car too surprisingly enough. There’s gold all over the central and western parts of the state and some of it is handily roadside. There’s some south of Springerville too! Some of the first times I went prospecting was with mules. A friend operated a stagecoach using a four up team of mules at Apache Land Movie Studio near the SW corner of Superstition Mountains. Had never been on a mule before, but plenty of horses. I couldn’t believe how well they took to the terrain. Gotta say, in that kind of rugged country I’ll take a mule over a horse any day. Sure footed as shit without a care in the world where as a horse would balk and get the skitters.
With the TV shows like Alaska Gold and the like, recreational mining has really gotten popular. Since then the easy access spots have got hit hard. So moving deeper into the less accessible areas has become a must in the last ten years or so. The recent popularity of side by sides makes it even a little more of a need to get in where the trails are too tight for them to go. I’ll usually 4x4 in close as possible with my quad on a trailer and camp gear in the truck. Making a base camp I can use my little 450 CanAm quad to get into really tight washes and ravines that see little to no traffic. You still have to do a fair bit of bushwhacking on foot eventually most times as yeah, you don’t need to be making any new trails. Believe me, there are more trails all over the desert than you’d think. That said there are also vast areas of rugged country with nothing other than game trails. Most washes are good trails and considered to be roads. Quads are the best way to go. You can cover a lot of ground fast with them without destroying your truck or the environment.
Lol, Death Valley is a trip in the summer! Camped out there for three nights in July when I was twenty something after picking up a mountain bike I had Tom Ritchey of San Rafael, CA build me. A dry heat I can handle, but when the “Monsoon” humidity comes I’m done for. Especially at this age, I hibernate in the AC or head to the high country.
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