Thursday, February 27, 2014

The Eye of the Needle and other trails 02-27-14

We met at the fire station north of town. It  was the usual suspects plus a guy named John and his wife with a stock Jeep TJ.
Patti still isn’t feeling all that great so my friend Bob of the “Bobs Eyes” blog went with me. Bob took a lot of the pictures for this post. 
Some of the pictures were taken by Becky of Becky and Dennis. 

When everyone arrived, we headed north on Highway 95 through Parker and continued toward Lake Havasu City. We crossed the bridge over the Bill Williams River. About a mile past the bridge there is a large area on the right where a lot of RV’ers boon dock.
We turned to the right, entering the large flat area.

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We stopped here to air down.

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The group split up here between those who wanted to take the hard route and those who would rather take the easy route.

We went with the hard way group.
On the north end of the large flat the trail drops into a wash.

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We turned right in the wash and traveled up stream. Not far up the wash we came to the hard part.

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Dick had a little trouble getting his Cherokee up the rocks but eventually made it.

Clifford had no problem.

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After negotiating the “hard spot” we met up with the easy routers and headed up the trail toward the Needle.

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There were a couple of bumpy spots on the trail

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But most of it was pretty smooth. It gets a little steep near the top.

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The Needle is one of the more interesting rock formations in the area. I was told that it is a lava core that had a lot of gas bubbles. Through the eons the weather has eroded the rock exposing the gas pockets.

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The eye of the needle is a small gap near the base of the rock.

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You can climb through the eye

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to look at the other side.

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We left the needle and headed back to the highway.

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At the highway, we turned south toward Parker. When we got close to The Parker Dam we turned right and drove to a picnic spot

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right on the shore of Lake Havasu.

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After lunch we continued our ride toward Parker.
We turned off at the road to the Desert Bar. A short distance up the road we took a trail to the right and wandered around the desert.

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We stopped to check out a mine that had been closed off.

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After leaving there we continued to wander around the desert taking several dead end trails. We came to another mine area with an old abandoned dump truck.
As boys will, we played around the truck for a while.

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We decided to drop down into a wash near where the truck was parked.

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We turned right in the wash and followed it through a narrow slot in the rocks.

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On the other side of the slot we came to some rocks to crawl over.

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It looked harder than it was.

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We stopped top check out another mine shaft.

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After a few hours of driving around the desert we decided that it was time to head for home. We got on the Desert Bar road and headed for the highway.
Bob and I pulled over just before entering the highway to air the tires up. Becky and Dennis pulled up along side us and we noticed that their right front tire was going flat. We hollered at them about the tire. They pulled over on a flat spot to change the tire.

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Tom and Lilly showed up. They must have been on the highway and saw us on the side road.


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After the tire was changed we headed for home.

It was a fun ride.

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