Freezing in Cottonwood

We ended up in Cottonwood, after running from the higher elevations (and incoming snow) of Payson.  Not that we ended up much lower, and the temperatures would still be well below comfortable all week anyway. We would even get snow during our stay here, the very thing we were trying to avoid. Eventually Kerri apologized for steering us into higher elevations during the exact week that this polar vortex thing was happening (damn global warming!).

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Cottonwood – four years, in fact – back when Kerri and I first met and we were keeping things somewhat quite. Things had changed a lot since our last visit. Namely the number of traffic-circles in the area, a well gentrified downtown, and that the local Walmart no longer allows overnight parking (which is fine by me). Restocking of supplies and a pair of nights at Dead Horse State Park (hot showers and some time to get over my new back pains) got us square into the middle of the work week.

Kerri had set aside a morning  to scout BLM land for a spot to camp the rest of the week. With limited time we eventually fell back to the old and trusted area of Forest Road 525. It took a few miles of scouting, but we found a nice clearing, on top of a rise, all to ourselves. Neither of us thought we would keep it too ourselves as there was more than enough room for a few more rigs and the spots leading up to here were all crowded with a half dozen rigs in each. Sure, we would loved to have had the place all our own, but in the end it turned out to be a great time with the new company. From a new van-life couple, a solo woman in a van, to a space engineer from Australia just taking in America for a few months in a Subaru, we all got to know each other and traded stories over campfires and cocktails.

We would stay in the area through the following weekend as well with plans to head into Jerome for Saturday evening, and a hair appointment in Sedona on Monday. That meant we had Sunday to explore some new dirt roads and find a place all to ourselves. It didn’t take long to find a road to scout, with Kerri’s map searching skills, and not long after we started we were parking on top of a hillside with Cottonwood below us and Jerome across the valley at about eye level. It was a spot mostly to ourselves, with surprisingly regular traffic passing by during the daylight hours. It snowed on us overnight – just a little – but we left in the morning to get to Kerri’s hair needs and then shot South past Phoenix again before the sun set.