KOFA Wildlife Refuge

Our neighbor wanted to go for a ride with the 4 wheelers so we took him out to the Kofa wildlife refuge.  We entered it on the King road which is up highway 95 toward Quartzsite just north of the border patrol check point.  Kofa stands for King of Arizona which is the name of the gold mine that produced lots of gold back in the day.  There are still a few active mines in the refuge on some private land within the refuge.  People always get confused when they see no trespassing signs in the middle of some government land but there are private holdings in the middle of public lands.  If you have ever been to Glacier National Park you will see some privately owned houses inside the park. 

The refuge has some beautiful scenery and lots of wildlife.  There are desert bighorn sheep, mountain lions, pronghorn antelope, wild burros, wild horses, desert fox and coyotes not to mention all the smaller critters.   We didn't see any but we were out in the middle of the day when you typically don't see much.  The road was fairly good which isn't the case with most of the roads in the refuge.  People can camp out here as long as you don't go more than 100 feet off of the road.  The weather was perfect with sun and no wind.  We went about 35 or 40 miles and our neighbor really enjoyed his first time out there.

Barry Goldwater Range -east of Yuma

Gold prospecting is on hold because it rained so we have been doing more 4 wheeling.  We went over to the Barry Goldwater military range east of Yuma and south of Wellton.  Its about 30 miles from where we are staying for the winter.  We had never explored this area of the Barry Goldwater before so we thought we would check it out.  It had rained a day or two before we went.  We thought it wouldn't be such a dusty ride if we went after the rain.  It was a good day for a ride and the road we took wasn't muddy.  We got quite a ways south but then the road turned into a very sandy wash.  The sand made us sink about a foot and while we could have continued it wasn't any fun slogging through the sand. 

The area is surrounded by very pretty mountains although my picture doesn't do the colors justice.  We also came across three tanks sitting out in the middle of nowhere.  Not sure if they were still in service since they had a bit of rust on them.  I can't believe the military would just leave them out in the desert to "die".  We tried a different road but it eventually got very narrow and muddy so we gave it up but it was still a good day riding.