Trippin' down South!!

Took a little drive to the south.. well, not a "little" drive, round trip was 2100 miles. I wanted to go visit my brother and his family down in Tucson Arizona and get out of the cold weather up here. At least that was my plan. Unfortunately the cold weather came with me, or I should say it went ahead of me and met me there. I had some snowy roads to contend with between Carson City and Bishop but traffic was light and soon I was out of that.

I camped the first night just east of Death Valley National Park and when I got up in the morning my thermometer said 18°. Now I was prepared for cold weather camping so night wasn't too bad on me but when I went to make coffee in the morning I ran into an interesting problem. Due to the freezing point of water being what it is, very little of my water supply remained in a liquid condition. On top of that, I found that a bowl of cereal covered with milk has a way of changing forms if you leave it sitting out too long. Oh well, ya gotta love camping in cold weather.

After spending 2 nights with my brother I headed back up north and camped for the night at a place called Burro Creek. They have a really nice BLM campground there but I didn't want to pay $10 for a place to park my truck so I found a little spot near that campground. Needless to say, I had a fire that night. What a difference that made! I found that some of the desert cacti that are dead have quite a bit of resin in them and burn quite well, as you can see.

The next day I had to drive over Hoover Dam so I did the touristy thing and stopped and took pictures. I had to say that I was surprised that the dam was so small. Somehow I had envisioned a much larger structure. It was easy to see why they chose that place for the dam.

Next it was off to visit my old high school friend who lives in Vegas. I stayed with Paul for 2 nights and and then it was off to Death Valley for a week. OK, Saline Valley to be correct.