City of Rocks Part 2 and Hot Wells, Arizona

January 2nd is a special day to me. I call it "Freedom Day". Three years ago, I called my then boss and told him that I was retiring. For many reasons, I had told very few people. I will never forget the feeling of suddenly becoming free. Freedom is amazing. I decided on this Freedom Day to take a hike.

We were still at City of Rocks in New Mexico. We had been there for 5 days and I had hiked every trail in the park except one. The Mesa to the north of the park is called Table Mountain. It is clearly visible in this picture.

The trail is 1.58 miles from the edge of the property. I hiked a mile or so to get to the sign below..

The mountain has two rock ridges. One about 3/4 up and the other at the top. The trail swings all the way to the left around the edge of the mountain and then goes up and over the first ridge. Then, it becomes fairly flat and traverses the mountain to almost directly above the sign and then goes up for the final pitch. The trail is steep at times and the views are certainly worth the effort. It was a nice blue sky day with a stiff west wind making it a bit cold, but not bad.

The view straight up the wash.

Now on top of the first ridge, looking across the ridge.

The view of City of Rocks from the top

The view of Signal Mountain in the distance. It had not been visible most of our stay due to cloud cover.

I ended up hiking a total of 5.6 miles. When I got back to the trailer I was tired, but happy that I had done it. I now felt it was time to move on. We had many impressive sunsets while we were at COR. Here is one of my favorites:

On January 3rd, we got hitched up and ready to go. I was bringing in the slides when we had our main slide just stop. I tried everything I could think of to get it in. I finally got on the outside and Kim hit the control and kind of forced it to come in.

We drove back to Deming and then took I 10 into Arizona. We turned at the small town of Bowie and headed north. We were shocked to see miles and miles of Pecan orchards. Many had been planted in the last few years. The road quickly turned to dirt, but had recently been graded and was quite smooth. We drove about 9 miles and then took a left on a paved road. That was a welcome surprise. I thought we were good to go and then we saw a spot where the road had been washed out.

Would you take your 22,500 lb. rig into that?

 Kim put on her muck boots and waded through. The bottom was solid and only about calf deep. We decided to go for it and had no issue getting through.

When we arrived at Hot Well Dunes, we were happy we went for it. This is a great place. It is an ORV riding area with lots of dispersed sites. They do not have water, but there is good 4G signal on Verizon. The cost is $3 per night. And here is the cool part, they have hot tubs! Kim loves hot tubs and it is the biggest thing she misses from our old house. They drilled wells here looking for oil back in the 1920's, but all they found was hot water. They use solar powered pumps to bring the water to the surface and continually fill the two tubs. As soon as the sun goes down, no more water.

We found a site that was very isolated and quiet. We got set up, but the main slide would not come out. I spent the evening reading all that I could find about our Lippert slides. I would tackle that problem the next day. Here is a shot of our site:

We had some fun while we were here, but I spent much of my time working on the trailer and my motorcycle. I will give you all of the details in my next entry. The good news, there is a silver lining to every cloud. This situation was no different.