Weird, wonderful & whacky whatnots…..in quaint & quirky Quartzsite

Jan 19 – Feb 4, 2008
“You’ve gotta come and see this” a stocky woman with a gravelly voice, probably from years of smoking, charged into our camping area. “You won’t believe it,” she continued with amazement. Four of us were sprawled in our chairs sipping on our wine and beer but we jumped up on her command “Follow me!” We’d never seen her before.
“That’s my trailer” she said as we roared on by. Her daughter and husband waved and called out “Hi”. They’re from Alberta and are terrifically friendly. Just a hundred feet or so ahead, we spotted some bright colour in a tree. “They’re parrots” she said. What an unbelievable sight. Three large rainbow hued parrots sat comfortably in the sparse tree about six feet off the ground. A man sat not far off outside his trailer keeping an eye on them. They were his and he’d just let them out for some fresh air and as their wings are clipped, there was no fear of them flying away. The birds, comfortable with people, didn’t seem at all perturbed as we came within a foot of them. They eyed us up with interest, squawked some strange sounds and preened, very content in their tree. I just can’t imagine travelling in a trailer with two huge birdcages - two of the parrots are a couple and the other poor bird is not welcome to share their quarters.

“We’re having turkey dinner in the desert - on Sunday announced our friends P&C. “We weren’t together for Xmas, so we’ll have it now. P&C cooked the turkey, gravy and green vegetables. We did the mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce & wine and our other friends C&W did dessert. It was an odd affair, our belated Xmas in the desert, with long tables set out on the rocky landscape but it was truly delicious and fun. We’ve learned that ‘pot-luck dinners’ are a snowbird tradition. Another night P&C made a huge cauldron of chicken & vegetable soup for all of us, so we reciprocated a few days later with a steaming pot of clam chowder. Life is pleasantly very different when you live in your RV; you’re not quite as remote from your neighbours. Mind you, I don’t think I’d enjoy this at home – it would detract from our freedom and our often chosen solitude.


A series of exhibition type shows take place in Quartzsite, Arizona
starting in January each year - the Sports, Vacation & RV Show, then the Hobby, Craft & Gem Show & finally the Rock& Roll Classic Car Show. ‘Folks’ arrive in droves in their RV’s – of all types. Humungous & luxurious 40-foot motorhomes are commonly seen with spindly 80+-year-old drivers clutching the steering wheels in a death hold. It’s wise to be careful when trying to cross the road in front of them. Quartzsite is quite a circus in show season and there are an excess of odd characters. Prospectors and rock hounds with long straggly beards and suspenders holding up their jeans; backcountry down and outers who probably consider Quartzsite as 'the big city'; little old ladies pushing their dogs in strollers or pulling them in wagons; old men clutching their tiny dogs tight to their chests in baby carriers; very large old folk (mostly women) on ride-em scooters, make one wonder if they are truly disabled or just extremely overweight; a straggling group of elderly women in a uniform of long dazzling gold sequin t-shirts and baseball hats; gaudy visors with wigs built in seem to be the latest trend with the over sixties – a trend I think I’ll bypass.


Life is simple here; a day can be wasted away just strolling around the seemingly thousands of stalls and temporary storefronts. Hardware, tools and other miscellaneous items spread out in row after row of bins – we often discover a special find in amongst the melee and everything is ‘cheap’, much cheaper than at home for sure. The same goes for RV supplies like outdoor carpets, chaise lounges, tables and every imaginable item – the prices are unbeatable. Next stall might be devoted to nuts and seeds with the specialty being ‘golden’ flax seed which proclaims to lower blood pressure & cholesterol, reduce the risk of cancer, control your appetite (that sounds good to me), reduce depression, stabilize blood sugar, relieve constipation & diarrhea (now that’s miraculous – that it deals with both ends of the digestion spectrum) and lessen the symptoms of asthma & other allergies. Such a phenomenon that I just had to buy some. Of course, rocks and gems are everywhere; some in raw boulders, some in slabs ready to grind and polish into cabochons, and some complete and set in a myriad of styles – the most popular being wire-wrapped jewellery. We bypass the antique booths of which there are many – just not interested in old stuff. That also goes for the swap meet stands – we have enough junk ourselves; don’t need anyone else’s. There are stalls of all kinds, specializing in kitchen goods, back supports, socks, carpets and pet supplies. You name it; they’ve got it.


Every day is Geocaching day; somehow, we always manage to fit in at least a couple of hours of prowling and hunting. We love the desert and there are a myriad of intertwining back roads fanning out from Quartzsite in all directions. Some of them are only passable by ATV’s but we manage most in our CRV 4x4. Geocaching takes us way out into the foothills and the mountains and I sometimes wonder how we’d find our way back without our GPS. Mind you, as soon as you get to high land, you can see for miles….that doesn’t help in figuring which of the snakes nest of dirt roads to take though. We always carry an extra couple of pair of fully charged batteries, just in case. We were out for about four hours one day, and didn’t see or hear another vehicle – what a wonder to be so alone out there. And it’s so pristine – not a sign of a plastic bag or a beer bottle. Some of the washes are very deep and not navigable so we park the car and hike the last mile or so to the caches, so by the end of the day, we’re exhausted but exhilarated.







#500
In the realm of Geocaching, the thrill of the hunt, the opportunity to discover new places, and to get in some ‘rough & ready’ hiking are the key elements. However, somewhere along the way, the numbers start to matter and competition rears its aggressive head. It seems that there are certain milestones that are key – certainly the 100th, but then the 500th. Wow! As we hovered closer and closer to the 500 mark, the numbers became so important. Our #500 was deep in the desert after a mile of tough hiking and when we finally grabbed it the hoots and hollers echoed across the valley. We are now back to enjoying the journey (as that trite expression goes) and we won’t get caught up in numbers again until we’re approaching 1,000.


The wide valley floor around Quartzsite is very rocky and hard – none of the sand dunes like those south towards Yuma or west near the Colorado River. It makes for perfect boondocking territory. The massive RV’s sit on it safely without fear of sinking and when the wind rises, there are none of those nasty dust storms. We’ve hiked across the vast plains and up into the foothills and mountains and as we’ve approached the hills, the desert floor changes; it starts to shimmer in the sunshine. The massive brown rocks have broken down with time and broken into millions of glistening pieces of white and pink quartz scattered over the terrain. I can hardly resist picking up piece after piece of the beautiful stone but eventually have to toss them back. Guess that’s where Quartzsite got its name. In one western portion just as the terrain starts to rise into the mountains, we ran into huge granite outcroppings riddled with caves which provided homes for early native Americans and on the flat tops above the caves, deep grinding bowls were constructed hundreds or more years ago. I wonder what they used to chisel them out and form them and what did they grind? You never know what you might find out in the desert. We’ve encountered graves, usually unmarked probably old prospector burials. Etched deep into the rock, high up a mountain in a wash, were the names of people who climbed through here some as long as 105 years ago.







The desert is green along the many washes, which are dried up between rainstorms. Twisted and prickly trees fight the Saguaro cacti for the nutrients – they’re often seen side-by-side, the tree branches wrapped around the lower realms of the cactus. In many of the trees, a parasitic plant that is related to the English mistletoe, form healthy round masses, sometimes blooming while the tree itself looks barren. Fernie soon got tired of me demanding a smooch underneath every tree – he just doesn’t see the romance of it.



The Colorado River runs just 20 miles west of town on the California / Arizona border. The river provides irrigation and the desert is green with immense fields of alfalfa and orderly rows of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and lettuce in varied shades of green. Back roads along the river open up to shady and sandy beaches; bulrushes hide a myriad of birds and the dunes provide ATVers with innumerable prospects for daring steep climbs. And of course, there are geocaches.





‘When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now…….’ sang the Beatles about forty years ago ‘……..will you still need me, when I’m 64”. We never thought in those, our glory days that we’d one day reach that ripe old age. Well, Fernie did on January 25th and he had his choice of Quartzsite’s restaurants, none of which are ‘fancy’ establishments. They are basic ‘down-home’ style affairs but one stood out to Fernie when a geocache took us out front of the eatery. A row of three toilets stand sentry beside Highway 95 and a geocache was tucked into the bowl of the centre one. The Grubstake Restaurant has an ‘All you can eat fish fry’ on Fridays – so of course that’s what he chose. Our friends P&C and C&W accompanied us so it was quite a party. Live country music (I wonder if we’ll start to like it along the way) resonated from the outside tent; rows of long tables surrounded the stage; beer was being swilled like water and the banter was raucous. We were seated at a gigantic slab of a table inside – it was about 8’ x 12’ and 16 people sat around it, their chins hardly higher than the table giving it the look of a kindergarten assembly – but there was no-one younger than 50 except for the servers who scurried around slopping beers and sliding huge platters of fish & chips in front of the eager and hungry patrons.


Unbelievable! In the middle of the night, the heavy drumming of pouring rain disturbed our slumber. It’s a delightful sound when you’re lying in bed but we didn’t want to wake up to it in the morning. However, it carried on intermittently throughout the day; the desert washes flowed freely and large puddles lasted for days after. At home in Vancouver, the rain can last for forty days and forty nights or at least that’s how it seems. But not so in the desert – later on that same day, blue sky started to peep through and by next morning the glorious expanse of clear blue skies had returned.



If I look out the window at home and see snow, I’m immediately depressed. But if our grandchildren wake up to it, they see endless possibilities for fun – maybe school will be closed; can we go tobogganing? Let’s make a snowman! And so forth. I remember in my middle years being so excited about skiing. While cursing the snow in the mornings when I had to commute, I could still look forward to some amazing night skiing on Grouse Mountain. So when did this love of the frigid white stuff end? I guess it was gradual. I no longer even enjoy a white Xmas – make it sunny and warm – please!


We ventured north from Quartzsite for a day at Lake Havasu, which is just over an hour away. It’s a picturesque drive, Highway 95 following the Colorado River north of Parker. High-end RV golf and boating resorts proliferate and many of the RV sites perch on the banks of the river with vivid green lawns surrounding them. The mountains are multi-hued and much of the desert landscape is irrigated to create velvet golf greens, which meander through the valleys. It appears that the town of Lake Havasu is booming – new big box stores just opened; new house construction everywhere; a new mall about to open in 42 days. But it’s so darn quiet there. Hardly any tourists were wandering around the centre, which revolves around London Bridge. What an oddity when you think about it that they dismantled the bridge in London in the sixties and rebuilt it in the desert. The thing about it is – it’s not even that attractive a bridge. Now if they’d bought London’s Tower Bridge and relocated it that would have been amazing. Some geocaches took us up into the mountains surrounding the town where the terrain was perilous but the views were glorious.

When we drove out of Quartzsite about 9:30am, we noticed an old man in a bright turquoise jacket and hat sitting on a suitcase beside the highway with another three suitcases piled beside him. We guessed he was waiting for a ride but it did seem odd. We were flabbergasted when the same old man was walking alongside the highway at 5:30pm pulling his 4 suitcases, which were loaded up precariously on top of each other . It was an obvious struggle for the wheels to handle the load. I guess we should have stopped.. ………but we didn’t and I’m feeling bad about it now.


One day, on our usual prowl into the backcountry, we came upon a whole bunch of people digging along a sandy wash. They had areas cordoned off and it looked as if they were archaeologists on a dig for old bones and ancient objects. I pulled in and sauntered over, nosy to find out what they were doing while Fernie elected to stay in the car.
“Are you digging for gold?” I asked a woman who stood above one excavation gazing down into its depths.
“I dunno!” she puzzlingly answered “go ask that guy over there”. I was not leaving until I found out what they were doing and if it was gold, were they getting any. A tall craggy-faced man in an open necked western shirt stood casually talking to a group of other men. I waited until there was a lull in the conversation and piped up once more with “Are you digging for gold?”
He sized me up and slowly drawled, “Sure thing, young lady”.
“Are you getting any?” I pursued (in retrospect, I could have phrased that better)
“Yup! Come on over here to my van and I’ll show you.”
I followed him over and he ransacked through his gear and brought out a large green gold pan and there in the bottom dried in with the silt were sparkly bits of gold.
By now, Fernie noticing my success investigating, clambered out of the car and strolled over to have a look too.
“Just wait until I put some water into it – that’ll show you how much is in there” and the prospector proceeded to slosh it around.
I made some ‘oohs and aahs’ about it while thinking, “Is that all there is?”
“I got this out of that hole over there just the other day – it’s probably about a third of an ounce or so - 300 bucks worth, I’d venture”
It looks like kind of a pleasant way to spend a day in the desert, as long as it didn’t get too hot.



We’ve been in Quartzsite now for more than two weeks and it’s almost time to move on. Two other couples have joined our wagon train circle in the desert now, one a couple in their thirties or forties – just babies in relation to the rest of us oldies. Too bad it’s just too darn cold at night to have a campfire. Instead, we’re in our flannel pyjamas and snuggled into the motorhome as soon as it gets dark. Today is Superbowl day, so we’ll hang around and ready Maggie for her trip over to Phoenix on Monday. Then Fernie will put his feet up, crack a beer, munch on some pizza and cheer on his team.