Getting stuck, finding a mine

We spent a couple of hours driving a loop of asphalt around the Mojave to scout some already-known boondocking spots when Kerri directed me down yet another dirt road to explore. While the known-spots were just fine, they need to be something special to meet Kerri’s standards, and they did not. This dirt road exploring is the entire reason we decided to leave the truck and trailer behind and live in a van. We can go places that are impossible for the larger setup. And these dirt road travels have brought us a ton of excitement and joy, and sometimes a headache or two.

A few miles down one road we ended up in a wash with the road only worsening. So to keep from making our day real sucky by getting stuck in the sand, we decided to turn around and try another road. But, in the process of turning Big Blue around his rear wheels sank into the sand. From past experiences I know not to even try to get out of it without doing some form of preparation. Spinning the tires will only make things much, much worse. Ironic that it was just last week that we decided to leave Big Blue’s shovel behind since we hadn’t used it all year. We dug with the leveling blocks which helped us off a beach in Baja once or twice and were free of the sand in a few short minutes. No big deal, right? Bah.

We kept rolling around, checking this and that dirt road, eventually falling back onto one that we had seen the previous day. It appeared to be tame enough road so off we went for a few miles until off in the distance on the side of a nearby hill Kerri saw a huge mine head-frame. “There must be a road up there”, she said, and I agreed. The road was easy enough to find and before we knew it we had settled in for our work week (so we thought at the time). The rest of the afternoon was spent exploring the mine before the early sun set which brought in the chilling winds. And once again we were under the blankets by 7 PM but enjoying our time back in the boondocks of the South West desert.