Rock Hounds, Tough Cacti and Dry Campers

 Quartzsite has become a mecca to visitors and exhibitors for rocks, gems, mineral specimens and fossils during the town's famous winter gem shows.  We are not enthusiastic rock collectors but we decided to hike out into the desert and see what we could find.

It was a cool and windy day but we drove north about ten miles out of town and started our hunt for rocks and fossils and whatever.

We stomped over some interesting public lands;  (BLM lands out here for Bureau of Land Management) but we found few rocks/gems of note.  Not even any gold!

We did find out just how tough a cactus can be.  Note the large pile of lava rock above.

When you look close.....

...you will notice this baby cactus hanging on to a tiny ledge in the rock for dear life.

All around Quartzsite we were surprised to see hundreds of RVs that were just driven out into the desert and parked. 

These winter visitors just fill up their tanks with water, drive out and live off their battery power.

"Dry Camping" is what it is called.  It is a cheap way to spend time in the southwest and it is legal in posted areas of the public lands.

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On The Road Again in California

We left Pala, California  on Saturday morning and headed north toward Riverside,CA then caught I-10 southeast toward Palm Springs.

We have seen fields of wind turbines before, but as we neared the Palm Springs area we were surprised to see the magnitude of windmills out here.

There were hundreds of them with no nearby residents to complain.  We also saw plenty of solar panels scattered across the desert floor as well.

We found sites available at the Hidden Sands Golf and Racquet Club Resort near the town of Desert Hot Springs, California.  The towns near Palm Springs have confusing names that include Palm Desert, Thousand Palms, Indio, and Cathedral City to name a few.

The resort we ended up in has a lush, green golf course.  Google Earth shows us that there are numerous golf courses in this valley.  We plan to explore on Sunday.

Our resort is old and the sites are tight but on a Saturday in these parts we cannot be too picky or we just might end up in the desert doing what they call "dry camping."  The winds on Saturday afternoon became rather strong so we soon understood why all the wind turbines were assembled nearby.

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