Week ending Feb 13, 2020 Imperial Dam LTVA

Friday we considered walking our garbage to the bins, then continuing on to the RV Solar Oasis. However, it would be about 7 miles so we took the truck.  There was nobody at the Solar place even though their hours for Friday indicated they should be there.   Then Joan remembered that today was the day we were to go to the Holtville, CA 73rd Annual Carrot Festival (Holtville says it is the carrot capital of the world).  The festival was supposed to go from Feb 6 to Feb 9th.  We figured Friday would be the best time to go to avoid the crowds on the weekend.  When we got there, around 11:00, we saw chairs lined up along main street for a parade.  Then we saw the carnival area set up on a cross street and parked near it.  There was nobody there, and everything was closed.

We did a quick check on the internet using our phone.  As far as we could tell nothing was happening until tomorrow, except the kick-off concert this evening. Only the carnival was supposed to be open from the Thursday until Sunday.  We decided to go into El Centro about 10 miles further west for lunch at Burgers and Beer.   Guess what we ordered! Good food and good service.   It is in the corner of the Imperial Valley Mall, so we wandered through the mall, browsing through JC Penneys and Macy's.  Joan found a pair of shorts in Macy's "final sale" area.  When she tried to pay for them with her Visa, it got rejected, saying to contact our bank.  This after we had just paid for lunch on John's card.  Weird.  We paid cash.  When we got back to the trailer, Joan checked our Visa, and we still had scads of room, so nobody had run over our credit limit between lunch and Macy's.  Must have been a glitch in Macy's system.   We'll keep an eye on it, especially the next time we use our Visa.

Saturday, we followed an alternate route to our little canyon.  We took Ferguson road out past North Shore Road then down into a fairly deep wash.  Then we followed that wash east until it met the little canyon.  We followed that canyon north until we got to the top of the wash.  There was an ATV trail all the way up the wash, so we wouldn't have had a problem following it down when we hiked to the top end last week, but better to be over-cautious than have to walk a long way back if there was a 'waterfall' we couldn't get down.  This direction was only 2 miles each direction, so an easier walk.

On the way back, we saw a burro trail angling up from the wash onto the plateau above, so took a bit of a shortcut getting back to Ferguson Road.  A short distance from where we came onto the road, an SUV was parked, and a couple had gone off the road a bit.  When we came up to them as they returned to the car, we got a chance to talk to them a while.  They had been checking out a geocache location.  They said there were quite a few along Ferguson Road.  When we described where we had been, he asked us if it looked like the canyon was good for repelling.  He has taught repelling in night classes at the U. of Utah.  Interesting to hear that the majority of students in the classes were women who wanted to learn so that if some guy claimed to be an expert in climbing, they could tell if he might be taking risky chances to impress.  Then he started getting more men by letting them know the class was mostly women.
Sunday, we went on the route toward Hess Mine for a short distance, then took a side road to the south.  We followed this for a while before we noticed an RV tucked in a wash ahead.  At that point, we followed a trail that headed south instead of into the wash.  We followed this trail for a while until it went down into a huge wide wash area that collected all of the washes going north and south between Ferguson Road and the hills to the west. 

Once in the wash, we could see a row of RVs along the top beside Ferguson Road. 

We found a trail leading up into the 'yard' of one of the RVs where we could get out onto Ferguson Road to head back north to the trailer.  From the road, we could see that there was a trail running north along the wash on the west side of the LTVA, noting some access points back down toward the north end where we could enter the wash on another day.

Lots of tiny purple flowers and a few yellow ones.  Rain is predicted for tomorrow, so there might be a lot more of them after that, if the rain falls here.  The Yuma forecast is our closest one.  Today it predicted cloud, but by 11:00 the sun was just above the clouds to the south over Yuma.

In the afternoon, we watched the Manitoba and Alberta curling finals, and the Nascar Clash at Daytona, the first event of 2020. 

Monday morning was very cloudy, with only a few patches of blue.  We drove into Yuma for breakfast at Black Bear Diner, picked up some groceries, drinking water and diesel.  Not much solar happening when we got back to the trailer so we started the generator.  It ran hard charging up the batteries for 4.3 hours.  It rained a bit, with some wind, so we had to find a place to run it out of the rain.  Around 4 we did a short walk along our row, as we had never walked to the end.  From there, we saw the Titanium 5th wheel which we had noticed coming down this row, but turning back.  It was parked a few rows to the south, so we headed over there to see where it was from.  As luck would have it, they were out doing some work around the trailer.   Merv and Donna from Penhold invited us in for a chat to share our experiences with our trailer. 

Tuesday we just walked the garbage to the bins. 

Wednesday we walked south along the wash beside Ferguson Road.  We saw a beavertail cactus flowering, and another painted rock.

Then we found a trail heading up a wash to the northwest

until we got back up on the mesa.  We came out at an intersection of burro trails. 

We thought we had crossed here on our walk on Sunday, but we were further west then.  We headed north from here until we got to a burro trail heading east back toward Ferguson Road.   

One of the rare saguaros in this area

Thursday we walked west along the south rim of Senator Wash to a group of cairns, one of which was at the top of trail angling down into the wash. 

We had seen this trail on our way back from our hike on Saturday.  The trail goes down onto a hard-packed ledge that sits above the gravelled bottom of the wash.  The walls of the wash are pock-marked with little caves.

We followed the wash west, getting down into the gravel bottom.   There were a couple of tricky sections where  there were little 'waterfall' spots. 

Further out, we went back onto a hard-packed ledge.  Along this, we had to make a decision whether to follow a burro trail back up to the rim  of work our way back into the gravel bottom to get to a point where the wash from Hess Mine comes into Senator Wash.  We chose to go down, and shortly got to the confluence of the washes.  We went into Hess Wash to look for a place to get back up on the mesa, as we didn't want to follow it all the way to where Hess Road goes into the wash.  We could see an ATV track going up over the rim. 

Before taking it, we sat for a few minutes for a snack.  We can see following Senator Wash further west on another stay, by driving out on Hess Road to where we came out of the wash here.  

Red-winged blackbirds in the desert