Bouse Arizona, ghost town in waiting?

It was a beautiful warm day to take a road trip, so I did, click the pics, and see what I saw.

Heading east out of Quartzsite on Plumosa road, going to visit the small town of Bouse.

I took a drive today about 20 miles from Quartzsite to the town of Bouse, Arizona. It's just a spot in the road.... a small spot, on a little road, and its sole claim to fame is it was an Army training base for tanks during World War II, and their commander was the most famous tanker of all, Gen. George Patton.

The military has a habit of training its soldiers in some of the worst places in the entire country, and I think Bouse fits right in with that scenario. There are miles and miles of miles, and miles, all around Bouse. It's a great place to train tankers for desert warfare, but it's a terrible place for a soldier to be. It's not that great now, and I imagine it was far worse in the early 1940s.

Colorado has a place like that, and it's named Camp Hale. It's up in the Colorado Rockies at a bit over 9000 feet and was used to train specialized Army troops to survive the snow and far below zero cold of the mountains and learn how to ski.

My experience with the Army, though somewhat limited, would indicate to me that sooner or later, the desert warfare tankers at Bouse ended up spending World War II in the Swiss Alps, and the Colorado ski troops were deployed to the North African desert to fight Rommel.

 Even though their locations were screwed up, Supply was never notified, so the guys fighting in the snow-covered mountains were issued Pith Helmets and Bermuda Shorts, and the guys in the desert got the Parkas and long underwear. And this happens so often that the military has a name for it, and it's called SNAFU.

Fortunately for me, I didn't have to suffer the way those Army guys did back in the 1940s, this morning, Living in tents with no air conditioning in 120° heat. I just flipped on my air conditioner in the truck and imagined what it was like to be out here in a Sherman tank in the summer when the tank's interior would be 150° and filled with desert dust. I imagine it was only their training that kept them alive under those conditions.

Bouse is not the prettiest, the most well-kept town in the country, but it is very popular with RVers and especially boondocker's. Quartzsite is not the only area that has a lot of BLM land. Bouse and many other places in this area have millions of acres of BLM land that you can boondock on till your heart's content. This is one reason I always fall back to Quartzsite, because no matter how many RVers are in this area, there is still plenty of boondocking lands that allow you to find a spot off to yourself if you so desire.

                                             theboondork

Coming down out of the hills from Quartzsite has a lot of open flat desert, and more hills. Most of this is BLM land and there were boondocker's scattered throughout the desert all the way to Bouse.

On the way to Bouse there is what we teenagers used to call a roller coaster road. Which is a real thrill if you drive over it just a wee bit faster than the speed limit. Although I wouldn't recommend that while pulling  trailer, if you want to stay in front of the trailer.

 There's plenty of room to boondock on BLM land. And you can ride your dune buggy, or your motorcycle on the flat desert, or up into the hills just as far as you want.

Looks like I got to Bouse just in time for their flea market. What is this fascination we RVers have with flea markets. We're the last people on earth that need to clutter up our lives with worthless junk.

Maybe it allows us to keep our shopping habit, by buying things that are so useless and cheap, they can be thrown away in a few weeks.

This is the basic history of the Army in Bouse. But before this it was a mining town that was started by a man named Bouse.

There's not much left of the Army here in the desert mostly a few concrete structures.

There's not a whole lot in the town, and a lot of its rundown. But the people here are proud of their history.

It seemed to me from seeing the people at the flea market that the average age of the folks around here is just shy of ancient. And that makes sense because a lot of them are RVers, and what on earth would a young person be doing in a town with no future.

From what I've always seen, when a town's population gets old, is things start to get run down. The old people that live here don't have the physical abilities or the finances to keep things from falling down, and there's not enough young people living here that you can pay to do the job, so the situation gets worse and worse until it becomes a ghost town. And from the looks of things if it wasn't for RVers spending the winter here, Bouse would probably already be a ghost town.