Yes, I Am Still Out Here

On December 26, bad weather blew in from the west and we are still having uncharacteristically cold, wet, and windy weather.  Winds in AZ topped out at 40 mph gusts, we had torrential rain at times, and many days the temps did not rise above 45 degrees.  Obviously, going out riding on the mountain trails did not hold a lot of appeal.

I have a bunch of unrelated photos which I will post with appropriate captions.  We are back in NM at Burro Mountain Homestead now, getting our new place organized and refurbished.  The site itself had not had any maintenance in probably at least a decade, maybe longer, so there is cleanup and painting to last for a while.

A very cold Bob Brown.

 Our new neighbors on Sunrise Ridge at Burro Mountain Homestead surprised us by showing up in January in the park in Arizona.  You can get an idea of how pleasant the weather was by Bob's photo.

Why you don't go out alone.

We went out for a ride one day with a couple of others from the park.  One of the guys had an older four wheeler which stopped dead miles from the park.  We managed to tow it back and he told us later than the local mechanic told him to get the backhoe and bury it in the desert.

Buzzed.

We were up at Flag Hill one day and got buzzed by a small plane.  There are a lot of small airports in the area and there must be lots of recreational fliers.  This guy, in my opinion, was way too close to the top of the ridge as he came past us.

Cocktail Hour

We met this delightful couple at the park.  Nancy and Paul live at Grand Junction, CO, where it was substantially colder than Hope, AZ, despite the poor weather we were having.

St. Patrick's Day

We had decent weather for St. Patrick's Day.  Paul and Nancy came over to help us celebrate the day.

A few days before we were to leave for New Mexico, our neighbors on the south from last year, Mike and Colleen Fennimor,  volunteered to take us on a ride we hadn't been able to find.  It took nearly all day to make this ride and get back to the park but it was well worth it.

View from the top of the Yuma Mine Overlook trail.

Looking down at the Yuma Mine from the top of the ridge.

Part of the trail to the top.

The day before we were returning to NM, we decided to have a couple of beers and burgers at a local cowboy bar down the road from the park.  No matter what time of the day, early or late, the parking lot is always full.  (Note to C'ville people:  this place reminded me of an upscale Westerner.)  There was the usual pool table, loud music, plenty of beer drinkers.  We walked across the building to the "restaurant" to order the burgers and then returned to the bar to wait for the food. 

We chatted up the guy sitting next to us who clearly had been on that bar stool quite a while.  While Mike was keeping up the conversation, I started looking around at the signs on the walls.

We planned our trip back very carefully, as it is 380 miles and we do it in one day.  Just one tiny oversight:  the highway we chose led right past the Renaissance Fair location and the fair was that weekend.  Took over an hour to go ten miles.  One bonus, though, was that the wild flowers were spectacular nearly all the way home.  That's what you get from all that rain all winter. 

'Twas the Day Before Christmas...

Temps in the mid to high sixties today, light wind, bright sunshine.  Definitely shirtsleeve weather.  

The park does a whole bunch of things for the holidays.  I volunteered one day to help decorate the rec hall.  Some decorations are especially eye-catching:

This is the Old West...you make decorations out of what you have.

There is a contest tonight with a parade through the park to choose the best-decorated golf cart or off road vehicle.  Here is one of the entrants:

And some decorations are more successful than others.

Faithful readers of the blog may remember that there is a lemon tree on the planting area next to the trailer and in front of it, a grapefruit tree.  While the lemon tree obviously isn't doing well (dead limbs, few lemons), the grapefruit tree is covered with fruit.  I brought my juicer from NM this year and I've had the BEST grapefruit juice on the planet for the past week or so.

The folks next to us on the north left the park at the end of last season and we had new neighbors this year for a month, Nancy and Paul.  (They have gone to San Diego for the holidays but will be back in a few weeks.)  One day the four of us wandered around in the mountains and wound up at Jail House Rock.  Already there was another group, several rigs.  Turns out they were from Parsons, Kansas, and they spend several months here every winter.  

Nancy with one the the ladies from Parsons.

I have been fighting with the seat belt/shoulder strap on the Polaris since I got it.  Finally I decided to order a four-point harness and take the factory-installed equipment out entirely.  This is an annoying job because you have to take the center console cover off as well as taking out both seats.  We only made one tiny little miscalculation:  when we removed the factory seatbelt, we engaged the governor that automatically limits the speed to 15 mph.  Fixed that the next day with a butt connector and electrical tape.  But we had to take the cover off the console AGAIN.

Paul kindly came over to assist in the job both days.  So now if I roll the Polaris, I will probably stay in it.  Probably a better plan not to roll it.

So to you all, loyal readers, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Whew, what a summer!

I'm just about worn out.  As you know from earlier posts, we took the Lance trailer to Burro Mountain Homestead, southwest of Silver City, for what we thought would be 4-6 weeks.  We liked it so much we signed a lease agreement and traded the Lance trailer  (22 feet) for a much larger one which we parked on the leased lot.  Within six or eight weeks, a much better lot, leased for decades, became available so we traded the Pinon Crest site for the Sunrise Ridge site, which meant moving everything.  (For you loyal readers, you may remember that Sunrise Ridge was where the cougar was spotted earlier in the summer.)

The new site came with an existing deck and two good-sized storage sheds.  It continues to baffle me how we have so much stuff when the object of living like this is NOT to have so much stuff.  The Hitchhiker trailer in Deming, with its great screened porch and storage shed, is for sale.  

No maintenance to speak of has been done on this site for a very long time.  It came with a 22 year old trailer which we just had hauled away, as the trailer we bought at the start of the summer is 20 years newer.  We did our best to get some of the maintenance done (the deck hasn't been stained for probably 20 years) but we ran out of time.  Lots of projects for next year. 

Many of the permanent sites have either a wooden roof/deck built or they have a car port covering everything.  Our new neighbor down the lane, Sam Bowman, has been incredibly helpful in solving a lot of issues and he told us unless we owned a lumber yard, a wooden structurer was cost prohibitive as well as taking weeks to get built.  He recommended a car port company out of Gallup, NM.  (Usually the first thing that goes bad on trailers is the roof; lots of caulking, a rubber sheet "shingle," and lots of opportunities for disaster.  The car port protects the roof and removes the dangers of leaks.  An additional benefit is the roof is shaded during the hot summer months and the trailer stays much cooler.)

Below are a couple of photos of that crew putting up the car port.  

Giant erector set.

When I ordered the car port, the company said to expect delivery in 6 to 8 weeks.  Although we were going to be in AZ at that time, Sam agreed to project manage it.  A week or so later, Sam got a call from the company that they could deliver it in 10 days (!).  So on the last day we were in the park, the crew showed up and got it finished in one day.  The wind kept rising as the day went on.  I finally quit watching the workmen because they were ON TOP of the rafters and passing big sheets of roofing steel which were like giant sails in the wind. A couple of times the sheet got away from them.  Fortunately no one was hurt but it was a dangerous day to be building one of these.  

We are now at the place in Hope, AZ, which consists of the park, a small chapel, and a closed gas station across the road.  The nearest "town," Salome, is six miles away.  I go to Parker (47 miles) or Wickenburg (60 miles) to shop.  It does encourage me to do a good grocery list because there is no running out to pick up something I forgot.

We have the side-by-sides with us but we haven't yet had time to go adventuring out onto the trails.  I hope we can get ourselves organized soon, as we haven't had much time to ride in a couple of months.  

Rains almost over, I hope.

This is a short post, as we haven't been doing much other than getting settled in the new park.

The monsoon rains started the second week in July and have been with us consistently.  It poured from Saturday of Labor Day weekend to Sunday noon.  Definitely took a lot of the fun out of activities here in the park.  Most of the temporary people packed up and left the park either Sunday afternoon or Monday morning.

One of the Labor Day weekend events was a silent auction.  Park residents cleaned out storage sheds and closets and brought all their unused stuff down to one of the park buildings.  You have never seen so much junk!  However, the park made $600 for the general fund and Habitat for Humanity sent a truck to pick up all the remaining items that didn't find a new owner.  

We had seen does and fawns at the salt block but no bucks until recently.  The bucks are growing out new antlers and the antlers are covered in "velvet," the covering which supplies blood to the growing antlers.  Soon the velvet will start dying and the bucks will rub it off on trees.  Now we are seeing the bucks at the salt block.  Do they need extra salt/minerals for their growing antlers?  And oddly enough, they ignore apples; they are only interested in nibbling the salt.

I don't count my occasional apple or carrot as feeding them.  I am careful to place the goodies when there are no deer in sight.  They connect the treats with the salt block, not a human.  

Earlier in the summer a stupid camper near the park was attacked by a bear.  This week the notice below was posted on the bulletin board in front of the office:

There is speculation that the cougar is a female with cubs and she has built a den in the woodpile.

The park is surrounded by thousands of acres of wilderness with a few scattered cattle ranches.  It is perfect habitat for the big predators, bears and cougars.  I have been told that bears occasionally show up in the park as well.  Before the dumpsters had lids, one slid down into one and couldn't get out.  A very angry bear.  Game officers had to come out to extract it.

We will be here at Burro Mountain for another six weeks or so and then we'll tow the side-by-sides to Arizona for the winter.  Riding is really good there and we will be ready to get lost again.

Rain, rain, go away...

Odd as it may sound, we are experiencing the infamous Southwest Monsoon season.  We have had torrential rains, lightning, thunder, almost every day for the past 10 days and this will continue intermittently for the next month.  Nearly all the rainfall in this area comes in a very short window in mid-summer to early fall.  People in the park have said that the rains will continue until about the middle of September.  When it's not raining, the weather is gorgeous; blue skies, temps in the mid-70's to mid-80's.

I attended the Burro Mountain Homestead Association meeting last Saturday morning.  The park functions more like a coop than a regular RV park.  Only residents with a year's lease are invited to attend.  

There was the usual reading of the minutes, treasurer's report, coffee fund report, etc.  The park sponsors a whole bunch of activities, including a champagne brunch next month.  I volunteered to help clean up after the brunch.  (I did go to the brunch and bused tables.  It's about the only work I've done in five years.)

At the end of the meeting, there was a spot for announcements.  A gentleman behind me stood up.  He knows someone (Forest Service guy, maybe) who has ten wildlife cameras in the area around the park.  The camera has recorded SEVEN individual Cougars.  The message was "BE AWARE."  There are a number of ranches in the area near the park and lots of cattle.  If the cougars get tired of deer, they munch on cattle which explains why there is a hunting season on them (the cougars, not the cattle).

Update:  It is still raining almost every afternoon. Lots of lightning, thunder, and poor Muppet is terrified.  Indy just sleeps through it and Lola is uneasy but not hysterical.  Mike's old dog, Bela, would panic and try to hide in any little cubbyhole she could find.  Once she got under the bed in the RPOD and got stuck.  It took both of us to work her out.

Strange accidents sometimes happen out on the trails.  Mike's left front wheel locked and would not turn.  Weirdly enough, somehow a stick exactly the size of the opening in the wheel got rammed all the way through and jammed the wheel.  

You can see that the stick was all the way through the wheel, barely visible from the outside.  When Mike took the wheel off, we could see why the wheel wouldn't turn.  Note the bent piece.  Took us half an hour or so to bend back the damaged piece, remove the stick, and get the wheel back on.  Took tools in both of our tool boxes to get all the work done safely.

I have mentioned that the deer wander freely through the park.  We have a doe who comes to visit and has developed a taste for bird feed.  No wonder this feeder is empty every morning.

Several weeks ago, I put a salt block down the hill behind our site near a game path.  Occasionally I put an apple on the salt block.  This morning, I looked out to see a doe munching the apple with a fawn at her heels.  The apple fell to the ground and the fawn tried to get a bite.  Mama gently nosed him/her away and ate the last of the apple herself.  The fawn had to have milk for breakfast.  

And now for something completely different...

We returned from Arizona to Hidden Valley Ranch at the end of March.  The wind was blowing and blowing and blowing.  Miserable weather.  

Was it time to do something else?  In the past two years, we've only been at Hidden Valley for about four or five months.  The remainder of the years we were on the road or in the park in Arizona (last winter).  With increasing age, it gets less attractive for us to wander around the country, taking the risk that if one of us has a health problem, we can find adequate care.  In the past couple of summers, we've seen most of the major national parks in the west and last summer we wandered around in Utah, riding off-road trails.

Deming gets unbearable (in my opinion) temps in the summer, lasting until mid-September or later.  This year it hit 107 degrees the first week in June.  Too hot to stay there.  About 70 miles away is Burro Mountain in the Gila National Forest.  There is a very old park, originally a homestead settled in the early 1900's.  Altitude is 7,000 feet so it's substantially cooler.

Burro Mountain Homestead

Just down from the lodge is a metal sculpture of a buzzard.

There is NO hunting inside the park.  The outcome is that mule deer have free run of the park and have absolutely no fear at all of humans.  Even though every incoming camper gets a copy of the rules stating DO NOT FEED THE WILDLIFE, dummies insist on doing it anyway.  

We had only been in the park for a few days when we made a run into Silver City, about 20 miles away.  On the way back, we were about two miles from the entrance to the park (up a 7 mile gravel road to Burro Mountain) when I looked at the gauges and saw that my right rear tire was losing air at a frightening rate.  

We limped into the park and made it to our site and saw the tire had failed.  Since we hadn't tried to change a tire on this truck, we had a horrible time trying to figure out how to drop the spare tire.  Some neighbors saw us struggling and came over to help, as they have the same truck.

Years ago, Larry Downey told me that RVers are the nicest people in the world.  If they see you might need help, they stroll over and volunteer.  In this photo, Kevin is lying on the ground to Mike's left, Jane at Mike's right is getting ready to crawl under the truck.

After all this excitement, we decided to make a run to another local peak.  More interesting experiences.  Jack's Peak is miles down a county road before you get to the road up the peak.  So it is a boring run.  We made the turn at Gold Gulch Road, proceeded a mile or two and saw CRIME SCENE tape.  

Across the road was another sign on a post reading WARNING:  BAD BEAR IN AREA.  Okay, what happened here?  

We went on to Jack's Peak, took a few photos, and went back the way we came.  I went into the office and saw they had posted a sign warning of a bear attack on a camper (a stupid camper, I might add).  The Continental Divide Trail runs through this part of New Mexico.  A very inexperienced camper had food in his tent.  The bear wanted it.  The bear got the food and the camper got a trip to the hospital.  Last I heard, rangers were looking for the bear to relocate it to a more remote area.  

Speaking of wildlife, it abounds here.  One of the park managers told us that there is an adult female cougar in the area and two juveniles and to be careful about the dogs.  We have seen javelinas, wild turkeys, and lots of mule deer.  It's no surprise that there are cougars; when you have such a large population of prey animals (the deer), you will have large predators.  No wolves left but there were once wolves here as well.   

Both of us liked the park so we signed a lease for a year.  The 22 foot Lance is just too small to live in for an extended time.  On a whim, I checked an RV dealership in Hatch, NM, 150 miles away and the nearest dealer.  I had heard they did not take the longer trailers as they were too hard to resell so I didn't expect to find much.  Voila!  They had a 2017 38 foot trailer which served our purposes.  I will post photos in the next blog.  

We drove down to Hatch, looking forward to eating green chili cheeseburgers at a famous restaurant down the road when we finished at the RV dealership.  Imagine our disappointment to find we had hit a day when the restaurant was closed...  But we did close a deal on the trailer so the trip wasn't wasted.  The dealership took the Lance on trade and delivered and set up the new trailer.  All I had to do was get out of the way.

I will get this out and start another post.  With any luck, I will get it finished in less than a couple of months!

Life at Burro Mountain Homestead

In the last post, I gave a quick overview of Burro Mountain Homestead.  Here's a bit more detail.

We have a site which is on a ridge above the main campground.  No one behind us, as you can see from the photo.  Lots of trees, junipers, pines, oaks, and others I can't identify.  A dramatic contrast to the view at Hidden Valley of desert and Cooke's Range in the distance.

  

There is a game trail which passes behind our place, just downhill from us.  The deer use it as a pathway from one end of the ridge to the other.  

We have one doe who likes to come onto the site to visit us.  She is so tame she would eat from our hands if we gave her the opportunity.  When we have had the dogs out and she has wandered in, she is not intimidated in the least by the barking.  She just sneers at them.  

I asked one of the park managers what happens to these deer when hunting season opens.  They have no fear of humans at all.  He said as soon as the first rifle shot of the hunting season is heard, every deer in the county comes into the park and stays until hunting season is over.