Moments in Dirt and Ink

Arizona State Trust Land Cattail Cove State Park Click for map. Another day for exploring around the Aubrey Hills, but this time heading a little north to the Cattail Cove State Park. It is almost two miles up the road and, apparently since I'm just a glutton for punishment, I have decided to find a route under the power lines to get there. After all, power lines have their roads. First I have to get across the big wash I finished in yesterday. That is easy enough because there are two roads down into it on this side and one out of it on the other and although that one is washed out in one spot, it is not a sufficient blemish to keep a few people from using the road so I ought to be able to walk it. From there it is easy to find the road under the power lines and then more road climbing up into the nearby hills. Another flattened spot, but it's a nice view. Artificially flat. Today is sunny, but plenty of haze from somewhere. Road down from the flat at the to...

Arizona State Trust Land Click for map. Today is a day for aimless wanderings, but I'm not very good at aimless, so I'll aim first for a rock some geocacher in 2005 thought folks should come out and visit (and indeed quite a few have since then) and then over to a selection of section corners that happen to be marked on my map. All this easily starts from wherever I happened to land the night before, which was south of Lake Havasu City. Something of the hills to the south has just been calling to me. I had tried for something on the Bill Williams River, but the road was muddy and marked not for camping, so I came back north a few miles. It's an expansive spot that looks like some developer got started but never finished. The rumors that come to me from other campers agree with this impression and add that one of a pair might be in jail now. It's a bit far from anything for houses, but if you build it, they will come. Flattened expanses on both sides of the...

Arizona State Trust Land Lake Havasu BLM Click for map. I have as a sort of goal to climb peaks listed as the USA Lower 48 Top 400 Peaks by Prominence and Crossman Peak is ranked #343 on that list. Unfortunately that rank is by height, but a bit over 3k prominence isn't too shabby. Getting there is much easier with a 4x4 or even just some high clearance, but Alltrails says I can do it in about 13 miles round trip, so I am going to go for it. The day is a little short and my start got delayed thinking I might have dropped my wallet out of a back pocket while scaling something nearby called "Little Haystack" on Lists of John, but finally located it in an unexpected pocket of luggage before having to scale the "3+" rocks again hoping to spot it. It's the little things that make a day go smoothly. Never mind, it is practically a road walk anyway and the weather will not look good on photos tomorrow, so I found my way to the end of the pavement on Bison...