These are reposts from my FB so some working my be funny.

February 2nd.

We are getting back in the grove of the work/travel life. It was cold and raining the first couple of days, though not nearly as cold as home.

We have put almost 100 miles on the RZR doing some normal things like running to the store for groceries and some fun exploring. We are a time zone off from our jobs and it is still winter so that means there is not a ton of "day" left when we get off work.

Tomorrow morning we will be doing "chores" so we can do longer rides this weekend.


Blue/green pin is our location. Red are some of the places we plan on going. Blue means we have been there.

Yuma Sunset

They are serious about staying on the trails on base.

Mountains of the Fortuna Mine

Fortuna mine

Fortuna mine sunset

Random things found in the desert

I think this is a road. Sometimes it is hard to tell.

Driving under the interstate is normal right?

Apparently Boogie thought my lap was the best spot.

 

Thank you for the post and looking forward to following along.
Wow, lows in the (upper) 20's. That is cool for down there. Looks like purfect weather coming up though. Enjoy.

 

We are on the west side of Kofa now. This morning is 35° and that is the coldest we have seen so far.

 

27 up here in Central Oregon.

If you haven't been there, try to get down to the Castle Dome Mine Museum. Nice ride down there and well done collection of old stuff.

 

That is our destination on Saturday.

 

February 5th

It has been a long weekend with just under 350 miles in on the RZR. So far our longest day was 140 miles. This weekend we broke that twice with a 142 mile day and a 145 mile day.

There are so many great things to see here in Yuma. We saw amazing scenery, a mini military museum, lots of random military stuff out in the desert including 2 wrecked planes, mines and so much more. There are too many pictures for one post so I will be creating individual posts over the next couple of days.

Tomorrow is back to work followed by chores afterward.

Scenery

Mine

Scenery

Yuma Proving Grounds

Combat Village

M-42 Dusters in the desert

F-14 wreck

 

The Indian artifacts (petroglyphs, mortar's, and caves) down by Horse tanks might be worth a stop if you are into searching around.
A bit further away, but doable (especially given how far you ride) is Dripping Springs. Some white man ruins up there.
I hear there are a couple old line shacks (that you can stay the night in) on the east side of the refuge, but haven't been there.
Oh yea. We found both a comb and tweezers to be super handy for removing Cholla spines from our dogs paws (and mouth when she tried to get them out on her own). She got pretty good at avoiding the plants but (as you probably already know) those damm things have a way of breaking off and "jumping" some distance from the main plants. Tried Rough Wear booties (heavy cordura with rubber soles), but those darn things would go right through. Better to let the pup figure it out.....and bring some tools to help you get them out.

 

February 7th AM.

Here is the the first of 2-3 posts from our rides the last couple of days. While they should not be overwhelming, there are more images than I normally post at one time. This post is going to focus on the scenery of the area.

There are so many amazing places to see in this world. I am sure if you grew up here these are just "normal" scenes and no big deal. Just like wherever you grew up is normal to you, but people come and visit that are because it is new to them.

I really like all of the colors, especially around mines. At home dirt is brown. Here dirt comes in a wide variety of colors such as reds, greens, yellows, blues, whites, and of course classic brown.

Cool old bridge that is closed to all traffic. Shot with drone.

*edit*Apparently this is the famous McPhaul Bridge, which I did not know when shooting it. https://azdot.gov/adot-blog/yumas-bridge-nowhere

Riding a rocky ridge line

Roads in the valley

Lots of colors

Cool formations

There are lots of "emergency" beacons on the range. The wording is serious.

Old building at a crossroads water hole

Beth and Boogie with a nice back background

Unique terrain

Lots of plants blooming

Does anyone see a cactus?

Unique rock formations

Old mine

Some of the mountains we were riding in

Nice sunset dinner on the RV deck after a long day of riding

 

That's some awesome riding. The desert can be loved or hated. We love it
We drive to Yuma when going to san diego and always wondered what's out there
Thanks for sharing

 

We like variety. As long as there are cool things to see, we are happy. 5 states, 3 years, 9000 miles.

You are welcome. I have a couple more of this area coming.

 

February 7th PM.

You never know what you are going to find while you are out riding. This time we found tanks, mobile AA guns, crashed fighter planes, practice village and even a possible rocket of some kind.

This is post 2 of now confirmed 3 posts that are semi picture dumps from our rides over the past few days.

Just cruising in the middle of nowhere you can come across so many things. This time as we were rolling down a road I noticed barrels and a turret and then even more. This ended up bing 6 M42 Duster AA mobile guns. Unlike items in a museum they are in poor shape, but overall intact. Even the manual controls to raise/lower the guns and rotate the turret were functional.

There must have been a surplus of the M42's as they are found in several other locations also.

In another location there is an M60 tank in similar condition.

We walked around "Combat Village" which is set up for a wide variety of military training.

Last but not least there are 2 fighter planes that crashed within a mile of each other. 1 is appears to be an F4 Phantom and I can not find any details about its history. The other is a F-14 Tomcat and I found one site with few details that said it crashed in 1983.


M42 Dusters

M60

Combat village

F4 Phantom

F-14 Tomcat

 

I am skipping one of the posts I have been copying from. It has 30 images of military vehicles from Yuma Proving Grounds. If people want to see them on this site I will post them if asked, if not I will keep it mostly RZR related.

February 10th


Today marks our last post from Yuma. Saturday we will be moving to a new location about 45 minutes north. As of right now we plan on moving about every 2 weeks.

Probably the most interesting thing about Yuma is that about 80% of the people we interacted with were from WA. On one ride we met a group of riders on the trail and the one looked really familiar. After doing the "we are from WA" and them doing the "us too", followed by "we are up by Spokane" since no one has ever heard of the small town we live in, and them following up with "us too", well they ended up being neighbors that live about 5 miles away. Who would have guessed.

Now back to the riding. We did 543 logged miles on OnX and I have posted the most updated image. A few days ago we did an evening ride that turned into a night ride, so we just turned on a few more lights. On another trip we found ourselves again on roads, or maybe not a road, but it is on a map and went somewhere, but it was rough and rocky. Those are not our favorite trails but they can be interesting. The challenge is when you feel like you have been riding forever and check the milage so see you have only gone 12.9 miles......

While we did not see Area 51, apparently Area 54 is located in Yuma

We did find a mine with a little extra surprise in it, see the pics. Since the mine is gated up who did it?

Area 54

Mountain scenery

Had to turn on the big lights

Sunset Cactus

Up on another ridge.

Is it a road? This was one of the better parts of this route.

Do you see the surprise in the mine?

Someone has a sense of humor.

 

February 11th.

Moving days and chore days.

We keep showing you all the fun we are having but being on the road for extended periods means daily life still has to happen.

Since we mainly boondock (no campgrounds for us) that means we have to supply all services such as power, water, sewer, heat and internet. Just like in a house things break or need maintenance (more so in a moving house) and so does the truck and SxS.

We have 3 sources of power. I have 1400 watts of solar on the roof that feed to a bank of 6 AGM battles that runs a large inverter. On sunny days this provides enough power to run everything we need to live a work other than the microwave, air frier and air conditioning. We can run the microwave and air fryer for short periods but they use a lot of power from the batteries.

To back that up we have the Onan 5500 watt generator built in. This is a fairly quite gas unit. It uses about .7 gallons of fuel/hour (from the onboard 30 gallon tank) but the bigger issue is oil changes at 150 hours and just the overall life of the engine. The truck has an APU (auxiliary power unit) that provides heating and cooling in the truck along with 60 amps of DC power and 30 amps of AC power. This year I wired in a plug so we could use the 30 amps of power for the RV. The APU uses .2 gallons per hour and has a 1000 hour severance interval. The nice thing is that it uses fuel from he truck tanks (275 gallons) and has a long life expectancy in the 10's of thousands of hours.

You can see the 2 x50 gallon fresh water bladders on the back of the truck. Those are used to refill the RV tank when we do not want to move the trailer to fill/dump. Of course if you are adding water, waste water has to go somewhere. Well that is what the extra tank on the side of the truck is for. You can see the blue hose leading to it. We have a small pump called a macerator that hooks to the RV and pumps waste into the truck. We can then take the truck to the dump station to dump and fill. I had to fix some wires on the water pump (bladder to trailer) and the macerator so I had all the wiring tools out.

After 500 miles it was time to do some basic maintenance on the RZR. I rotated the tires, checked a leaking axle seal and found a damaged brake line. It is drivable for now, but we ordered a new brake line so I can install it next week.

On travel days you have to take down items like the Starlink dish and pole. Secure all of the computers, desks, misc furniture and other items that may shift during movement.

We did not move very far, only about 45 minutes north to the new blue/green maker on the west side of the Kofa Wildlife Refuge. The red pins are some of the places we have indented where there are things to explore.

Wires from the truck generator to RV plug. 12v wires from RV to truck to keep those batteries maintained. It also added 4 more batteries for reserve power overnight.

Transferring fresh water

Transferring fresh water and transferring waste water.

Wire fixing tools.

Working on the RZR. The nice thing is I do not have to crawl around on the ground.

Well stocked 50cf toolbox. I have 2 layers of milk crates. 4-4 gallon and 12-6 gallon crates.

Kofa