Desert Center, California

After leaving Apache Junction, we headed west on I-10 to the Colorado River town of Ehrenberg where we spent a week at a membership park.  The first evening, as we strolled around the campground we met a gregarious couple from Oregon who sport the same last name as we do.  We soon established they were not related.  They promptly issued happy hour invitations for precisely 4:00 p.m. on whichever days we chose to “drop in”.  From their  riverside site  we spent several evenings watching the river flow by, yakking up a storm and nibbling away on various goodies.  Meeting new friends is the very best part of full-time RVing.

Since we’ll soon be returning to Ehrenberg, we didn’t want to see all the sights at once and then not have anything to do for our next visit, so we made only one brief trip to the notorious town of Quartzite.  Most of the snowbird population had already flown the coop, there were only a few rigs boondocking out in the desert. so it was less than an exciting visit.   I did manage to hit several bead shops and made a few purchases.  One would hate to be stranded somewhere with no projects to work on! 

We also visited the Hi Jolly Cemetery in Quartzite, the final resting place of one Hadji Ali aka Hi Jolly who came to the Arizona desert before the Civil War as a camel driver  during an Army experiment utilizing camels as pack animals for exploration of the southwest.  The experiment was abandoned and so were the camels but Hi Jolly stayed on, living into the 20th century.

Desert Center has turned out to be a very pleasant surprise.  We came here to visit our friend Betty who winters here.  The town has about 170 permanent residents and was originally constructed in an oasis by Kaiser for their mine workers at Eagle Mountain.  When the mine closed, so did the town.  Now, during the winter months, the population swells with flocks of snowbirds, primarily from the Northwest sections of the U.S. and Canada.  There are two small lakes (they’d be called ponds in less arid neighborhoods), a golf course, a library/firehouse and a community center.  There’s one cafe that’s open and one that’s not.  A general store provides staples to hold folks over between trips to either Blythe or Indio for serious shopping.  Either direction, it’s a 50 mile jaunt and given the rapidly increasing fuel prices, not one undertaken lightly.

Oases are very peaceful places.   The Interstate is two miles away so there’s no traffic noise.  There are a lot of birds tweeting and chirping and hummingbirds abound.   Lots of flowers are in bloom at present and the air smells sweet.   A stroll down to Lake Tamarisk to watch for fish jumping has a calming effect.  The air must contain some kind of soporific because the urge to nap happens several times a day.  It almost seems un-American to have a nap both before lunch and after.

Betty had never visited Joshua Tree National Park so we spent one day there.  We had hoped to take the ranger tour of Keys Ranch but it was filled for that day and so we had to improvise our own route.  The light when we arrived at Cholla Cactus Garden was incredible and this photo doesn’t quite do it justice.  There seemed to be a lime green cast to everything, including the air around the plants with a hard blue sky above.    Some of the ocotillos appeared just about ready to bloom and I expect by now they are pretty spectacular.  The joshua trees inhabit the northern  ranges of the park at a higher elevation and were not yet ready to bloom.

It being a relatively clear day we took the drive to Keys Overlook.   As you can see, there’s still snow on San Jacinto (on the left) and Gorgonia (on the right).  The low point in the middle is the San Andreas Fault.  I-10 goes between the two mountains and usually contains a semi-solid wall of smog trying to force it’s way into the Imperial Valley from Los Angeles. 

And so now it’s on to Niland on the Salton Sea for another week of fun in the sun. 

Editor’s note:  I’ve never been a fan of the Internet Explorer browser, but it is the best one for viewing this blog.  I have preferred Mozilla browsers for years, but, frankly, Firefox does an atrocious job of displaying photos, sometimes excluding them completely.  It took about six re-publishes to get the “Lake Tamarisk” photo above to show up.  Clicking on photos also sometimes fails to display the larger image.