Flickavoyages: Day #90. September 16 (continued).

“Woke up this morning, went into the kitchen, put on my slippers and died…” Wait that is another story by a different guy. I must have been dreaming. We wake up at Hole in the Wall to the sound of a Scott’s Oriole ‘chucking’ at us. Nice touch, Mojave.

We see a black tailed jack rabbit shamelessly cavorting with a cotton tail. An integrated rabbit community here in California.

After breakfast, we drive south on Black Canyon and Essex Roads to leave the Preserve, bound for the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in another famous western desert, the Sonoran. We take I40 east to Needles, CA on the Colorado River (population 4,844), then 95 to Vidal Junction, CA, which consists of a couple of gas stations, a trailer park, a closed diner and a billion head of cattle in expansive, confined feed lots. We smell Vidal long before we get there.

Route 62E takes us to Parker, AZ (population 3000) and through the Colorado River Indian Reservation and across the Colorado River. The reservation is home to Chemehuevi, Mohave, Hopi, and Navajo Native Americans.

We pick up route 72 and pass through Bouse (population 1000), Utting (population 126) and Vicksburg (population 600). Then east on I10 to Buckeye, Arizona (population 63,000). Don’t ask me why I insist on reporting population numbers. It’s what I do.

South from Buckeye on route 85 we pass through more captivating desert country to Gila Bend, AZ (population 1,900) where we watched Wile E Coyote cross the road. Further south we go to Ajo, AZ (population 3,500). Ajo is home to the New Cornelia Copper Mine, a sprawling one-thousand-foot-deep, mile and a half wide EPA superfund site. Superfund, as in bad news pollution. Although there is no active mining at Cornelia it’s still open because, get this, current owners say it’s too expensive to close, meaning clean up.

Onward we go toward Mexico and finally to Why, AZ (population 116). Don’t ask me why they call Why Why. Nobody knows why town folk call Why Why!

Wile E. Coyote Looking for a Handout.

High Dollar Fountain

At a Texaco station in Why, we watch, mesmerized, as two coyotes calmly walk into the parking lot and start asking the few store clients for a piece of pizza. An old ford truck sits at the station’s entrance with a fountain routed through it and a radio blaring out classic rock and roll alternating with stand-up comedy routines. Why not! Its Why, AZ.

Finally, we are in the heart of the Sonoran Desert, one-hundred-thousand square miles of hot, dry country stretching from southwestern Arizona, southeastern California, across Baja California and the western half of Sonora, Mexico, with a whole lot of nothing in between.

Organ Pipe Cactus (Stenocereus thurberi), a 'Signature' Plant in this Region

The Mojave Desert lies to the north, in southern Nevada, extreme southwestern Utah and south eastern California. So now we have traveled in three major North American desert regions, the third being the Great Basin Desert in the northern three-quarters of Nevada, western and southern Utah, the southern third of Idaho and the southeastern corner of Oregon. There are various systematic classifications of desert types throughout the western US that note differences in flora, fauna, average rainfall and so on, but fundamentally the entire region west of the 100^th parallel is arid.

Desertscape. Dry for Sure

To us traveling easterners lots of places we go out west look wet and even lush, but that is mostly because water developers transport water to those places from artificial impoundments via aqueduct and other means. San Francisco, for example, gets about twenty inches of precipitation a year and most of that between November and March. The rest of the year is bone dry. When Spaniards first arrived in these parts not a single tree grew there. Now the city sports a verdant urban tree scape all year, thanks to tunnels that transport water from reservoirs near Yosemite National Park, a hundred miles away.

The whole of the Sonoran is mining country, as are most of the western deserts through which we have driven. What else are you going to do in regions where the average annual precipitation in around ten inches. Many mines closed in recent years either because they played out or lost economic viability. All are potential, extreme pollution sources.On we go, pushing further south into Organ Pipe National Monument, driving through majestic, expansive, desert country, finally arriving at the Twin Peaks Campground, Site #33. No one else around. We have water, a sun canopy, nice clean restrooms and our very own solar, hot water showers, all for the outrageous price of ten bucks a night.