We drove up highway 95 from Yuma toward Quartzsite to give the truck a workout. It needed a nice long drive to clean out the engine a bit because we were using it too much for very short drives. The views of mountains and desert along this drive are beautiful. The area is made up of Yuma Proving Grounds which is the military's playground and off limits to civilians. On the east side of the highway its made up of a strip of land that is more Proving Ground but the closer you get to the mountains it becomes BLM land and then National Wildlife Refuge in the mountains themselves. Out in this area is a surprising amount of wildlife. There are bighorn sheep, mountain lions, pronghorn antelope, fox, coyote, wild horses and burros and of course all of the reptiles that love the desert.
It is actually raining here which means that there will be a nice desert bloom this spring. The downsides to the rain is that it will rain mud with all the dust being washed out of the air. It also means we are done gold mining until the ground dries out. The ground here hangs on to the moisture for a very long time -- that's how the desert plants survive but we need dry dirt to run our drywasher gold processing machine.
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