Hurricane, Utah

As we sit here on our final evening in Hurricane (or are we really in the ghost town of Harrisburg?), the rains have resumed and the mountains just to the west of us seem to have acquired more snow on their upper regions.  It has been a visit both busy and laid back and we’ve enjoyed our stay here.  This campground, while small and somewhat cramped, has all the comforts of home plus a grand view of the red rock cliffs and mountains beyond and the wider area boasts plenty to keep the sightseer busy.  Right at the entrance to the campground is the stone remains of one of Harrisburg’s original homes, up to and including the trusses to support the long-gone roof.  The vicinity sports other foundations or walls from the homesteads.  After being flooded out twice, the pioneers packed up and moved to higher ground; those who had built wooden structures dismantled them and took them along, trees being in very short supply in this part of Utah.

The town of Hurricane, somewhat further east, was named by an early settler whose buggy roof was blown off in a whirlwind. It’s pronounced HER-a-kin, not Her-a-CANE, which rhymes nicely with her right-next-door town of LaVerkin. 

Our first order of business was to check out the city of St. George, poking our noses into thrift shops in search of books and whatever else struck our fancy.  It’s a very clean city and seems untouched by the current downturn in the economy – shops were busy, traffic was heavy and we saw few vacant storefronts, unlike so many cities we’ve seen lately.  There appears to be lots of new housing and most homes seem to be occupied. 

Zion National Park is within easy driving distance of Hurricane and we made the trip on Wednesday for a revisit to enjoy the isolated beauty of the park.  It wasn’t so isolated this time; our visit coincided with the dreaded Spring Break so the park was awash with tourists, many dragging small screaming children.  Given that there is only one paved road to the interior of the park, visitors are asked to park either in the town of Springdale or at the Visitors Center and take one of the shuttles into the park itself.  The shuttles run constantly so we hopped aboard, rode all the way to the furthest point and then made all the stops on the return trip to the parking area.

There are many species which call the park home but  most were likely put off by the hordes of wandering tourists.  The ground squirrels were busily at work striking too-cute-for-words poses in hopes of shaking down the tourists for tidbits.  They can be very pushy and as the NPS signs indicate, they will bite.

Along the route we spotted this tom strutting his stuff on a small island in  the Virgin River.  The object of his affection, a plain-jane hen, could not have been less impressed.  She was much too busy pecking in the dirt for lunch.  We also saw a pair of condors riding the thermals in search of prey. 

Or waiting for one of these climbers to take a tumble.  Yes, those are people clinging to those sheer rock walls.  (Double click on the photo and zoom in to see the climbers

 

 

 

 

 

The Virgin River was running hard and fast but seemed well-confined within its banks.  We overheard someone say that the mountains which feed it are still heavily covered with snow and that the major snow melt is still some weeks away.  And so the river will likely get higher and faster before spring is over.

As noted, the park was crawling with tourists, many of them very inappropriately dressed for mountain trails.  Young girls were tripping along in their sequined flip-flops and bikini tops while more mature women were sporting Crocs in a variety of glow-in-the-dark colors. 

Only a few miles from our campground is the ghost town of Silver Reef, once a boom town of 4000 souls.  All that remains is the handsome Wells Fargo Building, now a museum and gift shop and the partial remains of a few other sandstone buildings.  The docent at the museum told us that Silver Reef was one of only two places worldwide where silver ore was found in sandstone.  The town went from boom to bust when the price of gold fell and folks just disassembled their homes and carted them off to greener pastures.  The view of the valley from atop Silver Reef is nothing short of magnificent. 

The majority of the land is publicly owned but there is a thin strip of land leading to the mines that is now privately owned and sports some fairly elaborate McMansions.  Only the wind provided the soundtrack.

On the way back to the campground we stopped in Leeds to explore the site of an early CCC Campground.  The young men’s handiwork is evident in many of Utah’s state and national parks, including the engineering wonder of the tunnel on the highway between Zion and Bryce Canyon.

 

 

 

The St. George Arts Festival is a highly respected gathering of artists and craftspeople from all around the West.  We decided to visit on Friday in hopes the crowds would be smaller…and they were…but it was still very well attended.  The majority of booths featured paintings and photography with only a handful displaying other art forms.  Such beautiful things, such talented people….for a brief moment I wished we had a house to put them in. 

There’s a Costco in St. George so we had to attend the “buffet” on Saturday.  There were too many pickled things and not enough sweets to suit me.  But we managed to fortify ourselves enough to roll on up I-15 to Kolob Canyon, one of the sections of Zion National Park which is only accessible from well west of the rest of the park.  Unfortunately it was overcast and so the contrast between sage-green plants and red rocks was not as striking as in bright light.  Kolob Canyon was also crowded with tourists, all the trailhead parking areas were filled and  we weren’t inclined to spend a lot of time.  There were still traces of snow in some of the higher elevations and when it began to rain on the trip back down to the valley, we thought perhaps there’d be a bit of snow.   We were spared that dubious thrill.

Saturday evening the campground had entertainment in the clubhouse, an energetic singer named Gayle Louise.  She was warmly received by the attendees.  During the performance we made the acquaintance of some of our fellow campers and ended the evening sharing dessert and drinks with them around a campfire . 

Our next stop is Provo where the weather is predicted to be anywhere from chilly to downright cold.  Stay tuned to find out if we end up amusing ourselves by building snowmen.

Bullhead City, Arizona – Adios Arizona

As evident from our most recent posting, we were having some fairly severe issues with the coach and coping as best we could.  But I’m very pleased to report that everything has been resolved and we’ll keep our fingers crossed that nothing new emerges to frustrate us or delay our plans, because for the next month we intend to relocate once a week as we inch our way northward.

Thanks to the coach-related problems, we spent most of our two weeks in Bullhead City waiting for phone calls or visits from RV techs, appliance deliverers and installers and assorted other events which kept us “at home”.  That was a good time to get the taxes prepared and in the mail and attend to assorted other minor chores so all was not lost.

As head chef, the biggest event in my life was the installation of a new microwave/convection oven.  The exterior is the same size as the original but new technology allows for a larger interior which means a 9x13 pan can be extracted without third degree burns to one’s fingers.  Since its installation it has been used in the microwave mode and the roasting mode thus far and seems to perform well.  It remains to be seen how it works for cake and cookie baking.

The Laughlin-Bullhead City International Airport, which is just across the highway from the campground, was the scene of an air show featuring many of the WWII-era planes in the collection of the Commemorative Air Force based in Tempe.  The star of the show was “Fifi”, the only remaining operational B-29 Super-fortress.  Perhaps flights were being sold to the general public because she made a number of take-offs and landings all weekend and well into Monday as well before disappearing for good over the horizon.  Wouldn’t that be a great adventure?

On Saturday we decided to make a dash “up the hill” to Kingman to visit the Route 66 Museum.  Having traveled The Mother Road in the early ‘60s from St. Louis to Los Angeles, I’m particularly nostalgic about the lore of the places along the way, although most my own memories are now really vague.  Lost as I was in musings about that long-ago trip, it came as an especially rude shock to return to the parking lot to find the car covered in several inches of heavy wet snow.  In Arizona.  In April.  Isn’t that against the law?  It can’t be said that a white-out was occurring but visibility was not especially good and we had no idea how much longer it might continue so we scrapped plans to visit The Mohave Museum and headed back to Bullhead City.  As soon as we crossed Coyote Pass and began the descent into the valley, the skies cleared and we were again in sunlight and enjoying the spring-like weather.  Snow, when confined to far-off mountains, is an admirable element; up close and personal…not so much.

We had picked up a flyer for a River Cruizers car show at the Avi Casino our final weekend in Bullhead City.  Naturally we assumed the Avi was one of the herd of casinos that crowd the shore of the Colorado in Laughlin.  Not so.  It’s quite a ways downstream.  Luckily Howie had asked for directions (breaking one of the cardinal rules of Guyhood) so we weren’t totally surprised that we had to drive for miles to reach it.  But there were times along the way that we thought we’d taken the wrong road, especially when we stopped seeing signs of civilization.  But, finally, there it was – an enormous complex with a huge array of classic and muscle cars, all that chrome just glittering in the sunlight. 
And what a pretty setting for such a show – the blue Colorado River matching the cars for glitter, huge blue sky, faux beach with white sand and tiki huts.  Hey, it’s a Nevada casino after all so a little sham scenery is to be expected.

 

Here’s a photo of one of my favorites.  This paint job was just amazing and the photo doesn’t begin to do it justice – it was so red that it almost hurt to look directly at it.   It would be a great color for nail polish if one had Dragon Lady fingernails.  We even found a Plymouth Fury convertible with push-button drive similar to my first car.  This one was buttercup yellow, however, and not powder blue.  Most of the cars’ owners were sitting under canopies or under trees, sipping colas and trying to stay cool in the desert heat, but with frequent pop-ups to wipe away imaginary fingerprints with soft cloths kept at the ready.

We also made another trip to visit Oatman, a ghost town and tourist trap.  On our first visit several years ago, we’d taken along a bag of carrots for the town’s herd of burros but this time we decided against it.  There were quite a few very young burros wandering about, some napping in the middle of the road, others just standing around staring into space, but most of them mooching from tourists.  And none too gently if some of the yells from some of the folks were any indication.  Being butted from behind by an insistent burro can come as a surprise.  The Oatman Hotel is notable for the legend that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their wedding night there in 1939 – one certainly hopes it was in better repair then than it is now.  So much for Hollywood glamour.

One of our running jokes is that we seem to find these rental RVs everywhere, usually on roads that are barely suitable for Jeep Wranglers much less anything larger.  It’s a bit off-putting to come around a hairpin turn on some winding mountain road and see one of these coming at you, probably driven by someone who hasn’t driven one before and who is “speed touring”.

 
We are currently just north of St. George, Utah where spring has arrived, trees are budding, the grass is green and wildflowers are in bloom.  Stay tuned for next week’s report from here in the land of red rocks.

Bullhead City, Arizona – Spring Version

We find ourselves back in Bullhead City following a two-week stint in Ehrenberg.  It rained last night and this morning there was a dense fog which obliterated the view of the high-rise casinos across the river in Laughlin, Nevada.  As the sun came up over the hills just east of the campground, it began to light the buildings near their tops with their lower parts still wrapped in fog; they appeared to be floating in mid-air, an appearance which slowly devolved until they were fully lit by the sun and looked much the way they always do.  It was much like watching the opening scenes of some space-age movie without the background music.

Our stay in Ehrenberg turned out not to be what we had expected.  We had hoped to catch up on some chores plus see the local sights we’d skipped on our first visit.  That was not to be and we spent the entire two weeks “coping” – that’s the term we use for dealing with the myriad problems which crop up when you live in an RV full time.  Imagine what would happen to your house if it were subjected to a fair to middling earthquake every few days; things would shake loose, break, fail.  And that’s pretty much what happens to a motor home. 

Our first big issue was dealing with a microwave/convection oven which had failed completely and was apparently not reparable, at least not by anybody within shouting distance of Ehrenberg.   A not-quite-exact replacement was ordered from a furniture and appliance store in Blythe but when it arrived the two installers couldn’t figure out how to remove the old one much less install the new one.  This exercise in futility took most of two weeks and we’ve had to make do with slow cookers and electric skillets in the meantime.

As we were about to enter into the final weekend, the water heater sprang a leak and was soon spritzing hot water all over the place.  Fortunately we were home at the time and were able to get the water turned off before any damage was done.  We spent the day sitting around waiting for a mobile RV tech to show up but by 4:00 we’d given up hope and located a handyman nearby who dealt with the problem in pretty short order. 

When we first arrived back in Ehrenberg, Galen and Betty Jo were already set up and had a nice pot roast dinner ready for us.  Our stays overlapped by about a week and so we were able to enjoy some neighborly time together, although not do any of the sight-seeing we’d had in mind.  On another day we made a mad dash up to Parker to join fellow Full-Timers, Jim and Pat, for a three-hour lunch at the Crossroads Cafe.  It had been exactly one year since we’d last seen them and so there was a lot of catching up to do.

The Crossroads Cafe is my idea of a really good diner – they serve breakfast all day long (except for pancakes and French toast) so I was able to tuck into one of my all-time favorites, steak and eggs with rye toast.  The daily special taco salads looked good, too, but I try never to pass up the breakfast option.

It ended up that the only sightseeing we were able to do was a quick stroll through the Ehrenberg Pioneer Cemetery which is directly across the street from the RV park.  It’s more an impression of a cemetery than an actual one; most of the graves (piles of baseball-sized stones) are unmarked and there’s just one large memorial to all of the early settlers who may or may not be buried there.  The prickly pear cacti were in bloom which lent a bit of color to the landscape but, being spring and quite warm, I was very suspicious of what might be lurking under those piles of rocks or coiled at the base of the cactus plants.

 

We are hopeful that our stay in Bullhead City will see all of the maintenance issues resolved and that we can look forward to our northward trek with a bit more optimism.