The last two days have been weird for me. I visited the Quartzite RV show tent, which is pretty similar to the Big E, or a state fair for those of you not in New England. I picked up a spare water pump, since mine is making bad noises, and some little bars like tiny shower curtain rods, which help keep things from falling out of cabinets. None of that was the weird part though, it’s that I’ve been pretty overwhelmed with an introverted mood and haven’t wanted to leave the RV if I didn’t have to.
Quartzite is pretty huge, with many square miles of drivable off road areas suitable for camping. Some spots are in RV parks but most is vast expanses of public BLM land, with veins of rough dirt roads on the high spots between frequent washes. The desert here is hard packed dirt covered in dark gravel with bits of quartz. Most of what passes for roads are just places where the gravel has been pushed aside or sometimes just driven over enough that it is apparent where someone else was able to travel. Whether or not your vehicle can follow depends a lot on it’s configuration, its tires, what the weather is doing, and what it might have done recently, via the violence of fluids. I made it about two miles down a road before I hit a spot I couldn’t pass. My RV has decent ground clearance, but a long wheel base. In flat ground I can army crawl in one end and out the other, but I can get hung up on a small mound if I can’t get any of my tires on it. So, I got high-centered and had to back up. If I had more time and energy I expect I could have made it with a bit of shovel work, but I decided to turn around instead.
Any such work, from hand, shovel, or tire leaves marks that last for ages. I’m currently sitting at one such mark, this with a low fence around it and signs of warnings and requests to preserve and protect it. It’s an image of a man with a spear, standing by a river under the sun. There are two fish in the river, and he may well be hunting them with his quartz-tipped spear. No one knows who drew it or why, only that it was discovered in the 1930s from an airplane, along with a few others in this area. One native legend suggests this is the spear that carved the Colorado river, though that lies a few miles west of here. Other intaglios, or geoglyphs as they’re known are closer to the river. This one is smaller than I expected, and the man himself is only about twenty feet tall, and skinny. An eight year old could have produced this drawing in an hour or so, but whether they lived one or twenty hundred years ago, no one can say. Now though it’s called the Bouse Fisherman, and it’s best photographed from a drone, which I don’t have. It’s ringed by the Bouse ATV tracks and now with the Bouse My Footprints. Aside from it being here, it’s an otherwise unremarkable but beautiful place, like millions of other flat spots between washes. It would be a good place to park the RV, though the 4G is weak.
I had a craving for water and drove to lake Havasu.
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