Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Tooling around south of Quartzsite

A couple weeks ago I picked up the "Quartzsite Off-Road Atlas", which maps the major trails on BLM land around Q.  Since a lot of the BLM routes are now numbered, there was a workshop to add those numbers to the maps in the book.  Also at the workshop we were tipped off to the mapping app Avenza and the free topo maps of the area.  Between all that info it was definitely worthwhile attending the workshop; I'm now a lot further ahead figuring out where we are and where the trails go.

We spent a day tooling around BLM land south of Quartzsite finding some of the points of interest on the maps.
Picture Rock

Coomb's Cabin

Empty tin cans as wall filler.  Ya work with what ya got.  
Pictographs or graffiti?  Time will tell.  
Joseph Freemont cabin.  
Not sure if the gravesite is real or just a touch someone added.   

Quartzsite Intaglio 

We even searched for and found that darned missing Arizona Peace Trail... from Q to B this time.  Yay!  
Aha!  Here's the turn we missed the first time... AZ Peace Trail goes right while the Old Stagecoach Road continues straight.  You'd think a sign here would be worth the couple bucks cost.  


Monday, February 6, 2017

Flying again!

While we were in Lake Havasu City stocking up on recovery gear for Sara we came across my poor broken DX-3 drone's big brother, DX-4 on a shelf in Walmart.  DX-4 is pretty much identical except that instead of recording onto an SD card it sends the video to a smartphone attached to the controller.  

Welllll, the price was pretty decent and the old DX-3 parts will fit the new DX-3 (sent to Ardrossan) AND this one, so I let Wendy convince me to pick this up.  And since I inherited her old Samsung smartphone when we switched the accounts over last year, I'm all set to go.  

I'll try not to bore you with too many aerial pics of the campsite, especially since I'm still not a very good pilot, but I'll throw in a few shots occasionally like these ones of the intaglios at Bouse and Quartzsite.  Who knows, someday I might be skilled enough to even get a decent picture on purpose...