October 25th, 2017

The terrain around here is about as desolate as it gets

At the last minute I decided to stay another day at the Homovovi state Park.  I was packing up and getting ready to leave this morning when I decided that I had no real reason for leaving here.  The weather's been perfect, it's quiet and not crowded, and sometimes I find it enjoyable to sit on a rock in the middle of ancient Indian ruins and wonder how they survived out in the middle of absolute nowhere without a Walmart nearby.  Of course there no longer here so maybe the lack of a Walmart was partially responsible.

I looked up the boondocking area on the Internet where I'm heading tomorrow, and found out that its not only well-known but quite popular, to the point where now I'm worried about it being too crowded.  It actually appears to be closer to Cottonwood than to Camp Verde and it's located on a road named 10,000 trails, and with my penchant for getting lost that name is far from encouraging.

The humidity since I've been here has been in the single digits and the temperature in the 70s, so my skin is starting to look like an alligators and I can't even spit without drinking a glass of water.  Normally it takes a little time to get used to the desert environment, 10 years is enough for most people, some never do.  But actually I'm not even in the desert.  The desert is still about 100 miles south of here, and as a rule of thumb when you see your first Saguaro cactus, then you're in the desert.

                    theboondork

I walked up into the hills searching for some petroglyphs, but apparently I walked up the wrong Hill. That's my truck in the background. If you want to avoid the crowds you have to go where no sane person wants to go.

There's an 1800s cemetery you can walk to about half a mile from the park office which has a dozen or so people buried in it. There was a very small Mormon community here in the 1870s, 1880s but harsh conditions and crop failures caused the surviving settlers to pack up and move on, leaving their children and other family members, that couldn't survive this harsh environment forever Interred in this tiny, desolate cemetery.