January 10, second day at the cave

click the pics

Arizona mountains

I slept till 7:30 this morning since there's no sense getting up early as cold as it is, and I'm boondocked in a canyon, so it takes the sun a while to rise above the canyon walls and start warming things up. And those canyon walls also block any sunrises or sunsets from looking nice unless I walk for a ways to the mouth of the canyon.

As I mentioned before, the Colossal Caves infrastructure was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps back in the great depression days, and they didn't pay much attention back then to making campsites relatively level. In those days, camping was considered roughing it, and the idea of Glamping hadn't been invented yet. So having your camper level while sitting in a hundred-dollar lawn chair, sipping a crystal glass of Château De Swill, never occurred to them. So the Lance had to be leveled up, and the truck tires had to be chocked up to keep it from rolling down the hill into the dry wash. Fortunately, chocking your truck tires is nothing new to a mountain man.

I took a walk yesterday afternoon down what passes for a road in the campground. The CCC workers paved the streets in 1932, and little has been done to the roads since then... I've always been amazed that this country could build interstate highways crisscrossing America quickly and efficiently, and now we can't even keep them repaired. But anyway, the campground road would be much smoother if they scraped off the scraps of busted-up pavement and made it a dirt road. At least then, they could do some maintenance to the dirt road, but there are bits and pieces of pavement over parts of the rutted dirt road so nothing gets repaired.

So it's the same old story, folks that were raised back in the day when my dad was growing up built the infrastructure of the greatest and freest country the world has ever seen, and now the bozos that run this country, and the idiots that vote for those bozos, can't even keep what was handed to them on a silver platter working.

Sorry for the rant, but when I see a place like this that has so much natural beauty falling into disrepair it breaks my heart... Why is it like this? For the same reason our infrastructure is always like this... Money! And why is there no money? Because crooked politicians spend it on giveaway programs that keep them getting reelected year after year until they die.

I had to chock my wheels to make sure the truck didn't roll backwards into the dry wash.

Saguaro cactus.

Saguaro cactus. the Colossal Cave Park had some of the largest Saguaro cactus I've ever seen in my life.

The roads in the campground were awful. And they were all like this.

Of course the roads in the campground came with a warning.