One of the things you can do in Ajo is drive the 10 mile long "scenic loop" that starts in downtown Ajo goes around the gigantic defunct open pit copper mine, up into the mountains behind Ajo, and back down the mountains into downtown Ajo where you started.

Now the reason I'm telling you about this is the "scenic loop" goes mostly through BLM land and is very popular for boondocking. In fact I think most boondocker's would consider it the most primo boondocking in the area.

Since I've been here this winter I've driven various parts of the scenic loop and taken a few pictures at different times of the day and decided that I would put the pictures together into a kind of a photographic tour of the scenic loop showing some scenery and some boondocking spots, not to be so much of a "how to boondock on the scenic loop" story but more of a "why some people like to boondock", kind of story showing the desert scenery you can enjoy and live in, if only temporarily, for free.

When you turn off the paved Highway 85 on to Darby Well road you will be on a dirt road until you come full circle back to Ajo. For the first part of your trip you will be driving alongside the tailing piles from the New Cornelia open pit copper mine which is about a mile and 1/2 wide and 1100 feet deep, and was the first major open pit copper mine in Arizona. This is private property and is fenced off, but as a rule of thumb everything on the left of the road is BLM land and suitable for boondocking until you get past the mining property and then there's more BLM land on the right also.

This is a piece of Darby well road and as you can see it's wide, and not in too bad a shape. There's no steep hills, no sharp turns, and easily passable by most RVs. It's wash-boarded in places but not all that bad as dirt roads go. This first part of the trip is where I see class A's boondocking, but things get a little more iffy for large RVs on down the road.

The scenery along the whole way is very pretty if you like the desert look which I do. But at the same time its very rugged, fairly dangerous, and completely unforgiving, so If your not sure about what you're doing be advised deserts are very inhospitable places so if you plan on doing any serious hiking out here I would suggest spending a lot of time on the Internet finding out about all the things that can go wrong while walking around in country like this, and if you're not sure about what you're doing, stick to the walking paths outside of town. Needless to say I stay very close to the road and my truck when I'm taking pictures, not because the landscape bothers me but because it's a known smugglers route for the Mexican cartels and there are government warning signs on the road informing you of that fact.

Here's a place on the right side of the road that you can boondock near the tailing piles without trespassing. It also shows that you don't have to have an RV to enjoy boondocking in the desert, they even have an outdoor shower, or an outhouse, maybe it's both.

Here's a typical place on the left side of the road on BLM land where you can boondock, there's even a fire ring already built. Some spots are big enough for numerous RVs, depending of course on their size, and some places are only big enough for one small RV like a van. It's first come, first serve, so common sense, a good attitude, and introducing yourself to the folks that's already there helps a lot before you squeeze in with other people.

We're only about 1/3 of the way through the scenic loop road, I'll have pictures of some boondocking RVs tomorrow.

                                   theboondork

Last night's sunset.

Even if I didn't know that the "Big Show" in Quartzsite was over already, a walk around my boondocking neighborhood this morning made it pretty obvious. I counted 16 RVs boondocking at the old rodeo arena which is about twice as many as when I got here. There's still plenty of room without getting crowded but I think it goes to show that if you want to find a primo boondocking spot to hole up in for a while in Arizona there's a lot more opportunities while the "Big Show" is going on.

Knowing that Quartzsite is starting to clear out is making me start thinking about when and where I want to go next, and so far all I can come up with is....I don't know. I've been here almost 20 days already but I've still only got a very slight urge to go somewhere else. I'm comfortable here, it's peaceful, and there's some things to do, so at the moment there's no pressure on me to leave other than the nagging feeling of having stayed someplace too long which I usually get when I've been somewhere longer than two weeks.

                            theboondork

Looking back at the Arctic Fox as I started my walk this morning.

Part of my neighborhood. Its getting crowded, but not enough to make me search for more wide open spaces........yet.

that's my boondocking spot on the far left. Straight ahead up the road is another Arctic Fox just like mine.

Some F-16s were flying over yesterday on their practice bombing runs so I decided to try taking some pictures again even though the pictures I've been taking have been rather poor and barely worth putting on my blog.

I started thinking about the problems I was having getting the pictures and what I could do to make them better. Most things were beyond my control, such as the planes are pretty far away, and moving very quickly giving me only four or five seconds to take a picture, and it would often take me that long just to find them in the sky, I could hear the roar of the engines, knew the plane was way ahead of the sound, but it was still a very small target against a huge expanse of Arizona blue sky.

I've been using a Canon 100 – 400 zoom lens handheld to take these airplane pictures because I really don't like using a tripod if I can possibly help it, and the ball head mount that I have on my tripod would probably have made it more difficult to chase down an airplane in the sky anyway.

I don't shoot much video anymore so I had forgotten about the Manfrotto fluid head video camera mount that I bought a while back and figured that might solve some of my problems. That kind of video camera mount makes it easy to smoothly pan and tilt the camera in any direction so your video is not jerky whenever you move the camera which is just what I needed to be able to follow the jets as the zip across the sky.

So I mounted my Canon 7D Mark two camera on the tripod using that head and it helped a great deal. The planes were still very far away but at least when I did get a shot the camera was held relatively still, and the smooth panning of the video mount made it easier to follow the airplane across the sky.

Now even zoomed out to 400 mm the planes are still very far away and pretty small in the picture so I still have to crop the picture a great deal to get what you see here. And then when I put them on my blog the Internet messes around with them which makes the picture look even worse, but they are a little better than they were.

And I found out that I really liked using this video head better than my normal ball mount, it makes composing a picture way easier, so I think I'll leave it on and try taking a few regular pictures with it and see if I want to use it all the time instead of the ball head mount.

I hope this post hasn't been too boring for everyone. I know a lot of folks like to take pictures so I thought there might be some interest out there about how I get mine.

                                theboondork

this is an unedited picture taken with a 100 mm lens, so the F-16 is way bigger in the sky than what I'm seeing with my eyes. A dot is pretty much all I can see when the planes fly by.

Using the Manfrotto video head and the Canon 100-400 lens, I'm still having to crop way in  on the airplane so the pictures wouldn't be suitable for printing, but I'm getting more that are suitable for the Internet than I was before.

The only reason this F-16 looks like he's flying almost level with my camera is because he's so far away.