#8 Coveys Great Adventure - Arizona Part 2

Arizona part 2: January 17-31, 2015

We are certainly seeing a lot of southwestern Arizona this month. We really enjoyed staying at North Ranch and touring the area around Wickenburg, but were ready to move on and revisit one of our favorite parks, Dead Horse Ranch State Park. On the 17^th we hit the road to Cottonwood to rendezvous with Christine and Ed Woznicki. 

Dead Horse Ranch was the destination for our first RV trip, and it was just as nice as we remembered. The park has a small river running through it that creates two distinctly different sections. We like the Quail Loop campground, which is along the river and has lots of trees that shade all of the sites. The other campground is on a nearby hilltop without any trees or shade, but compensates with great views of the surrounding hills and spectacular sunrises and sunsets.

The happy wanderers

Cottonwood has two unique personalities. The newer part of town offers all the usual chain store shopping options where we stocked up on groceries, wine and a few parts for the coach. Old Cottonwood, on the other hand, is the original town comprising a number of interesting shops, restaurants and galleries spread out along Main Street that has avoided looking too much like just a tourist trap. It’s a quiet, kind of low key place to stroll around, have lunch or dinner and just relax. One shop you don’t want to miss is Ye Ole Hippie Emporium at the east end of town. Along with an interesting assortment of 60’s revival “stuff”, it has a neat selection of off-beat posters, funny bumper stickers and signs pertaining to that era, and some very eclectic period music. Kayeanne says the book selection is worth browsing, too.

Jerome clings to the side of the mountain 
above the old copper mine

Revisiting the old mining town of Jerome was one of the main reasons I wanted to return to Dead Horse Ranch. Last year we had just enough time to drive through it and realize how much there was to see. Jerome was the site of one of the richest copper mines in Arizona, but when that played out in the 1940’s, it became a ghost town. In the ‘60’s, hippies started moving in and slowly began rebuilding the town as an art and crafts center. One thing lead to another and Jerome is now a popular destination with lots of shops, bars, restaurants and a very interesting mining museum that has a mine shaft going straight down over 1900 feet. It is covered in thick glass that you can stand over and look way, way doowwwnnn. If you have problems with heights you probably want to pass on that, but the rest of the museum is certainly worth seeing, too. Don't miss all the old equipment spread around the grounds.

This is one of the easy sections

Huge sink hole near Sedona

Ed and Christine towed their highly modified Jeep along on this trip. One day we planned to head into the back country that is only accessible with that kind of vehicle, but every trail we tried to use was closed. Not discouraged, we went to Sedona where Ed gave us a demonstration of what he described as "easy" rock crawling. I was a little nervous when he just drove up a boulder field that I wouldn't have wanted to walk up, but the Jeep handled it without even working hard. Very impressive stuff. 

Problems with the complex systems in the coach are my worst fear about this whole adventure. Casa Covey has run flawlessly since September when we had a number of incidents when the engine wouldn’t fire up. I thought we’d solved that problem with fresh batteries and a new relay in the start circuitry, but it wouldn't restart after pulling into the campsite at Dead Horse. Needless to say, that raised raised my anxiety level. After a few minutes it did start, which was both good and bad news: good that we could move to a better site and get properly positioned for the week, but bad because it is much harder to find and fix an intermittent problem. Ed and I spent most of two days testing circuits, looking at wiring diagrams and talking through the circuit logic. The upshot of all this cogitating was to replace a fuel system relay and the small solenoid it energizes that in turn triggers the big starter solenoid on the engine itself. It has started flawlessly since, so we’ll see whether we nailed it this time.

 My pictures don't do it justice, so I borrowed this one

Every January, tens of thousands of RVs converge on the desert around the village of Quartzsite AZ transforming it into the largest RV gathering in the world. After a week in the relatively lush area around Cottonwood, it was time to head to Quartzsite. As you crest the hill on I10 and start down the long grade toward town, you can see RVs are spread across the desert for miles in every direction. The draw is the world’s largest RV show, but for many people the show is only an excuse to head to Quartzsite to hang out with folks that they may only see once a year. Literally hundreds of thousands of RVs bring more than a million people to this small patch of desert every year.

Abandoned mine near Quartzsite

Like last year, we joined the group of Foretravel owners that Ed hangs out with on the Internet. They generously tolerate our Monaco coach among their classy, exclusive rigs. Ed’s son, Zack also joined us for a few days, and we all went off-roading in the desert, visiting an abandoned mine and seeing some really spectacular desert country.

 The entire desert around Quartzsite is controlled by the US Government Bureau of Land Management, so it is open to public use, including camping. We just pulled off of Rt. 95 onto a dirt road that lead to a flat piece of desert and spent the next 5 nights at no cost other than the fuel we burned in the generator.

Ed and Christine

Our group comprised about a dozen coaches, with some leaving and others arriving every day. Visiting each others rigs, talking about upgrades, solving problems and general palaver made for a very pleasant visit that we now look forward to every year. The RV show was interesting, too, but we managed to keep our wallets (mostly) closed. Maybe next year.

On January 26, Ed and Christine headed back to California and we pointed the coach toward Tucson where we will spend February at Justin’s Diamond J RV Park. More on that next time.