04-30-13

Yesterday took the Secret pass trail.

Secret Pass is in the mountains just east of Bullhead City, AZ. I have driven by those mountains a couple of times and wondered just what was back there. Well yesterday we found out, and we weren’t disappointed.

To get there we drove west from Golden Valley on Highway 68 about 16 miles and at milepost 10 we turned left onto the dirt road. We were following the directions in our “Arizona Back Roads and Jeep Trails” book.
As soon as we got off the highway we stopped to air down the tires and zero the odometer. The odometer in the jeep is not very accurate so we also used the GPS odometer.

Everything was set and we took off. After about a half mile we made our first wrong turn and went up a very nasty trail to a col-de-sac (of course).
We decided to go back to where we started, reset the odo”s and try again. This time we got it right and started climbing some very steep hills on a power line road that had a lot of loose rock on it. I was hoping that we wouldn’t have to come back down this way.

 

We followed the power line road for a while, marveling at the scenery. This area has a lot of craggy peaks and interesting rock formations.

 

We paid close attention to the trail description in the book and watched the odo’s closely. The trail on the north side of these mountains is pretty rough and slow going.

  

We passed an old mine tunnel but didn’t drive down to it because we didn’t want to mess up the odometer reading

Once we got on the south side, the trail became much smoother so we just tooled along nicely.

We made all the correct turns and didn’t get sidetracked. There are lots of intersections on this route so it would be easy to mess up.
Eventually we got to the end of the trail at the wilderness boundary.
Here there was a kiosk

and an old hitching rail.

We couldn’t go any further because of the wilderness. 

The night before we went on this trip, I was watching some videos of the secret pass trail and saw some jeeps crawling over boulders and up and down dry waterfalls. I didn’t see any of that on the trail but the trail ended at a large wash so I decided to check it out and found where vehicles had driven down the wash over large boulders and up and down dry waterfalls.

 
It looked like Clifford might be able to go down the wash a ways but I decided that it wouldn’t be prudent to do so since we were alone.
I know white jeep Dennis and black jeep Dennis would love this wash so maybe we will try it some time next season.

From the trails end we headed back to a major intersection where we stopped to have lunch. It was a very hot day and there was no shade anywhere so we decided to sit in the jeep for lunch.

There was a breeze so it wasn’t bad.

After lunch we headed west on what the book called the Slurry Road. Again there were many intersections on this trail so we had to watch the mileage very closely and pay attention to the directions in the book.

Along the way we saw several plants that looked like some kind of Joshua tree or maybe Yucca. As it turned out, they were Yucca trees.

  

Most of the trail was pretty easy but there were a few spots where we had to go slow over rocks and such.

The views were great. At one point we could see Laughlin and the Colorado River.

There were also more intriguing rock formations.
This one is called Thumb Butte.

I don’t know what this is called but it reminded us of a rock in the Chiricahua’s called the Virgin Mary.

You can see an old mining area at the foot of the mountain.

We only made one wrong turn on this section of the trail but it was a col-de-sac so we didn’t get to far off the route. It was near the old abandoned mine shown above.
After going through the mine area we got onto a wide dirt road and in a short time we were back to highway 68.


It was a fairly easy ride and we had a good time. We were home by 3:00.

Today we are going to Laughlin so Patti can try her luck at the casino and we can have dinner at the Out Back.