Bullhead City and Oatman

After spending a few days at Pahrump, we returned to the Las Vegas area intending to see the Nellis AFB air show.  We stayed one day in the Lake Mead national recreation area near Government Wash.  Although quiet and isolated, we changed our mind and made reservation for a week at the Ridgeview RPI park at Bullhead City, Arizona.  We refueled at the Costco in Las Vegas and arrived at Bullhead City on November 14th.

Boondock near Lake Mead

We stayed at Ridgeview during our 2017 snowbird trip.  The park is near the Bullhead City airport and overlooks the many casinos on the Nevada side of the Colorado River.

The historic village of Oatman is only 14 miles away on the original route 66.

We visited Oatman for one afternoon to enjoy the tourist shops and the many feral donkeys that roam the town's streets.  Although picturesque, the streets reek of donkey dung.

The town, once a gold mining center, is now devoted only to tourism. The donkeys will beg for food if they see you carrying any sort of bag.

After a week's stay we'll next head south for Thanksgiving with the Escapees Boomers group.

Death Valley 49ers Encampment - Twenty Mule Team

Photo From Wikipedia

Death Valley was the location of a number of mining operations.  The most famous mining effort was the Borax mine near Furnace Creek.  From 1883 to 1889 borax was scraped from the valley floor, and loaded into wagons.  Mules were used to pull the wagons some 80 miles out of the valley.  The Twenty Mule team wagons were made famous by the television series "Death Valley Days" sponsored by Twenty Mule Team Borax and narrated by none other than Ronald Reagan.

 Annually, during the 49ers Encampment the mule train is assembled in a parade to the borax mine.

I got good pictures of the Mule Team at the mine on the second days parade. 

This year the wagons have been rebuilt with new wood faithfully mirroring the original construction.

We finally took the obligatory picture of the entrance sign during our departure from Death Valley on November 10th.  After over 10 days of boondocking we settled into the RPI park in nearby Pahrump, NV for several days. 

Death Valley 49ers Encampment - Dantes Point and The Wagon Train

Dantes Point is a mountain peak on the East side of Death Valley with an awesome view of the southern section of the valley directly above Bad Water Basin.

Dantes Point was closed for road construction during our 2017 visit.

As a part of the 49ers Encampment there is a group who do a wagon train journey into the park camping and traveling by horsedrawn wagon and dressing in period clothing.  The Escapees Boomers and the Solo groups were invited to have a pot luck dinner at one of the wagon train camps.

The wagon train members cooked various dishes in dutch ovens.  The Escapees also brought food to the potluck.

After queing up and loading our plates from all the circled wagons.  We fed our faces on lawn chairs around a large bonfire.

When the dinner was over, a quartet of musicians entertained us around the fire with a lot of fun cowboy songs and fiddle music.

 

Death Valley 49ers Encampment -The Racetrack

From The Kanab, Utah area we traveled west toward Las Vegas.  After doing some shopping and picking up mail in St George, Utah; we found a BLM area to the west of Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada.  We spent a couple of nights there.  No hookups, totally quiet and good Verizon cell signal.

We broke camp and headed toward Death Valley on Oct 31st.  Stopping for gas in North Las Vegas we arrived in the early afternoon at Sunset campground in Furnace Creek.  The campground is basically a gravel parking lot with fresh water and a dump station but no hookups.  We picked a site in one of the overflow lots (reasoning that the traffic would be minimal away from the entrance and the dump station).

Members of the Escapees Boomers group arrived a few days later.

In the meantime, we did one of our bucket list items by visiting the the Racetrack Playa.  The dry lake bed known as the Racetrack is located in a fairly remote section of Death Valley.  We did not go to the Racetrack during our 2017 visit due to its remoteness.

From the Furnace Creek campground we traveled about 50 miles north on paved roads to the Ubehebe crater.  Then there is about 27 miles of rough gravel road to reach the lakebed.

Stopped at the Ubehebe crater to take some pictures and to air down the jeep tires.The crater appears to be a volcanic ash vent.

View of the Racetrack at about 2 miles.

The Racetrack lakebed (appearing to be about 5 square miles) is in a valley surrounded by mountains with no outlet for any water from the scarce winter rainfall.  The water on the lake drys to a concrete hard clay surface.  The movement of the thin skin of ice in the winter is thought to be the reason that  some of the rocks littering the lakebed appear to move.

We found only a couple of rocks that seem  to have made tracks on the lake surface.  We spent about an hour and a half walking about the lakebed and its center island, the "Grandstand".  Truely a surreal location.

On our return route we stopped at Teakettle Junction.  The origin of its name is not clear.  However, there are quite a number of teakettles hanging on the signpost.

Our return to the campground was uneventful.