Chloride, New Mexico

When we were in New Mexico we took a trip to a "ghost town".  Chloride is an old mining town that now has about twelve people still living there.  There is a very interesting museum with a small RV park behind it.  The Chloride Bank is now a cafe.   We ate there and the food wasn't bad.  The cook was trying to upgrade the menu.  They can't get deliveries there so he has to drive the forty or so miles to town to get supplies.  They may run out of certain ingredients before the next run.  The waitress told us about a privately owned field a block down where for two dollars you can park and off load your four wheeler.  There is a Forest  Service road/trail that starts at the end of the road in Chloride and goes up into the mountains.  If you take it you will cross a stream over 150 times which may or may not have water in it. 

The other picture is of the "hanging tree or Chloride forest".  Not sure if they really used it for hanging and it is the biggest tree around so it gets the "forest" tag as a joke.  It's a little bit of a drive to Chloride with at least one hairpin tight curve to get up and over so not sure I would want to take the RV but lots of hunters do make it. 

Chasing a Quartz outcropping

We are in Quartzsite, Arizona doing some gold prospecting.  The area surrounding the town is all public land and full of old mines and diggings.   There are pretty white quartz mounds all over the place and pieces of quartz litter the ground everywhere you look.  Here I took a picture of the quartz the old timers were chiseling at and the hole they dug where the fence is.   Gold likes to hang out with quartz so it was tempting to dig where you find these outcroppings.  Mostly we would see lots of digging and smashed pieces of quartz but probably no gold was found or there would have been major digging. 

We found a little gold this time.  Not enough to take a picture but at least we didn't get skunked.  The dirt finally dried out enough so we could use our drywasher but now its time to leave and move on to Yuma.  We are hoping the ground there is dry enough so we can get digging. 

Apache Pass

We took the 4 wheeler up to Apache Pass when we were staying in Elephant Butte, New Mexico.  Apache Pass is in the Caballo Mountains and south of Elephant Butte.  We got high enough to see Elephant Butte Reservoir in the distance.  Seeing some pretty blue water in the middle of the desert is a treat.  We did not go over the pass we just got close to the top and then chickened out of going any further.  The road turned into a goat trail and we were out by ourselves so if we got in trouble it would be a very long walk through the hot desert. 

We left Elephant Butte and headed to Willcox, AZ.  Its a small town just over the border from New Mexico off of I-10.  The town was getting ready to celebrate Rex Allen days -- an old tv cowboy that lived in the area.  We then stayed a few days in Gila Bend which is half way between Tuscon and Yuma.  We visited friends who live in Sun City West one of the Del Web developments.  The area has the oldest population in the country.  The average age is like 78 years old.  The houses in this area sell like hotcakes and sell before they even hit the market.  We have to say it was a very nice neighborhood with nice manicured lawns and very quiet. 

We are now in Quartzsite which was still in the mid to high nineties when we arrived.  It is now in the high eighties but it cools off at night to the fifties.   Very nice!