“On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool, cool rain
I can’t sleep and I lay and I think
The night is hot and black as ink
Oh God, I need a drink of cool, cool rain.”
~ Pete Townsend
Interesting week. I started north of Snowbowl, in the mountains outside of Flagstaff. The site was fine.
It was a little too crowded over the weekend with city folk (Matt’s term) and lots of off roaders. Large herds of cows grazed in the adjacent meadow and that drove Cosmo nuts and his constant barking at them drove me nuts. I was too close to the main forest road. By Tuesday I was ready to move. I had to go into town anyway to pick up my new glasses from the eye doctor, so I stopped and topped off my fresh water while in Flagstaff. I decided to be brave and mapped my way to a spot west of Flagstaff I’d never been to before, but which someone had suggested. It turned out to be a bust. I encountered several “No Camping” signs. I decided to go back to the spot I was at when the fires chased me out. I plugged in the coordinates and GPS decided to take me the back way (shorter distance, about the same amount of time as “the long way around.”) I started into the forest, and the road was rough. There were lots of people camping on both sides of the main fire road. As I went deeper, there were no campers, the road got a lot rougher, and there were major ditches across the road filled with water from recent rains.
Some were long and wide. They could have been just a couple of inches or a couple of feet deep. No way to tell. Either way, the chances of me getting stuck in the mud were quite high. I drove around the first couple, weaving through trees close to where the road had been. The deeper I got, the more “ponds” I found in the middle of the road. I was about a half-hour in on a trip that GPS said would take 35 minutes. I looked at the map, and I was only about 1/10 of the way there. There were no humans anywhere nearby, but I did see many huge antelopes. The odds of me getting stuck were too high and I wasn’t exactly sure where I was if I needed help and was quite certain I would never convince a tow truck to come down this God-forsaken road to pull me out. I turned back. I retraced my steps until I got back to I-40 and then headed toward Flagstaff where I picked up I-180 and headed north past Snowbowl. I drove about 3 miles into the forest on a gravel road and then took a side (two track) road about ¼ mile to a spot I’d stayed in before. The dirt spot itself would get muddy if it rained, so I pulled off into the meadow adjacent to it.
It would still get soggy with the rains, but at least I wouldn’t sink in the mud. And if I needed to escape when the monsoons came, the two-track was downhill, and not too far from the gravel road. I was pretty sure I could make it out.
Lessons From The Road: I need information to stay safe on the road. Where can I find potable water? Where is the nearest place that will pump propane into an RV? What is the weather? Since I’m getting to be pretty familiar with the Flagstaff area, I kind of know where to get water and propane and gas from Flagstaff, through Two Guns and even in Winslow. This week I needed to know the weather. I was about to move to Two Guns. The weather channel said it would be mid to upper 90’s all week. Accu Weather said it would be 104˚ most days. When I asked Siri, I got yet another, completely different forecast. I wanted to avoid getting stuck in the mud in the Flagstaff Monsoons, but dying of heatstroke in Two Guns didn’t seem any better of an option. I finally asked ChatGPT, believing that it gathers info from different sources and gives me a synopsis (at least that is my understanding. Who knows?) I told it I wanted to go camping this week and was concerned about extreme heat and extreme rain and mud. I asked which would be better, Flagstaff Mountains or Two Guns. Chat GPT said: “Unless you are looking for extreme dessert conditions, I’d go to Flagstaff. The rain should be more manageable for camping than the heat in Two Guns.” I figured it to be a coin toss, but accepted Chat GPT’s advice.
It has rained daily, with some extreme thunderstorms and some massive hailstorms, but the sun is out most of each day, drying the ground and making even the rugged forest roads drivable. There is also a bonus in that the daily rains have kept the tourists out. Even over the weekend, it was quiet here and I’ve not seen another human all week.
But my lesson is that accurate information is extremely difficult to obtain, even in these times of lightning fast connections to vast networks worldwide. Three weather sources and three radically different forecasts. I also asked Google Maps for directions to where I currently am. It tried to take me the shortest distance, even though the “roads” (and boy do I use that term loosely after trying to navigate them) were impassible. I carry a computer in my pocket that is many, MANY times more powerful than the ones used to put men on the moon, and yet I cannot get 20 miles from one side of Flagstaff to the other with directions it gives me.
And finally…My happy song of the week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzhFqG-gJTo&t=11s
See you down the road,