Wednesday, February 20, 2019

La Posa South - A Special ATV Tour




My Friend Camilla offered an excursion in her ATV from her camping spot in the La Posa South LTVA (Long Term Visitor Area). 

Camilla loves her ATV as it gets her the 3 miles to downtown Quartzsite and out into the hinterlands of the large BLM landmass here.

She said I’ll take you a nice area down by some mountains.  This is where our adventure actually started and where I started recording our tracks.



Camilla drove and she handed me her phone where she had a GPS map of off-road Quartzsite Trail Map.  She would tell me and I would confirm the turn on mostly unmarked trails.
 


It’s been cooler and wetter than normal in the desert, leaving lush green areas like the picture above.



Our next stop was this window rock in the Kofa Wildlife Management Area, adjacent to the BLM land.  Kofa property is posted against off road vehicles.


Above is my OnXHunt Sofware that I use to know what land I’m on.  You can see our location noted by the blue dot highlighting we were on BLM (yellow) and Kofa (Green).



As we were driving down a wash used for a trail we spotted this mine carved into the rock bank of the wash.



The next stop was a larger mine.  This opening is about 5’ tall.



Inside the mine entrance is this colorful quartz with green, reds and yellow coloring.

There are other surface mine shafts above this location.



Here is an Ocotillo plant flowering.



Down below my exploration is Camilla in her ATV.  So far we have been in roads and trails.  Little did I know I would get to see what that little machine can do.


Plants and landscape are always different at every turn out here.

The next part of our ATV travels got real rough.  All I could do was hang on as Camilla climbed over rocks and up and down embankments.  At one point we were following a trail through a wash.  It go to the point that it helped giving guidance to Camilla as I scouted the direction.  This also included moving some big rocks to provide a clear way to drive.

Finally, we were back on trails / roads that were much less challenging and headed back to Camilla’s camp.



Above, one more stop at this rock formation.  You can’t see them but there are little white cacti in between the cracks.  Camilla had to point them out or I wouldn’t have seen them either.

From the marked map above I estimated that we our off-road excursion was about 22 miles long.  It also show that we were out roaming around for about 2 hours 40 minutes.

Today, went places with the help of Camilla and her ATV that I could not have gone with my 4x4 Tacoma.

It was a great time this afternoon and I had fun with Camilla.  She is a very giving person and a very good ATV handler.  

Thanks for the good times.

Brent

macaloney@hotmail.com

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