02-06

Yesterday we took a ride with a group of our friends.
There was Becky, Dennis, Suzanne, Roy, Missy, Junior and of course Patti and me.
I wanted to go to the far north end of the Plomosa Mountains, make a loop around them and come back to Plomosa Rd. As usual the trip didn't quite work out as planned.
We left the park around 9:30 and drove almost to the small town of Bouse, AZ, a distance of about 25 miles where we unloaded the two Rhino's.

While we waited for the ATVs to be off loaded I lowered the tire pressure on Clifford.

I had pumped the tires up for a trip we took to Yuma the previous day.
When everything was ready we headed west through the flats where a lot of people were dry camping in there RVs.
The first interesting feature that we saw was some low rounded hills with several caves in them.

We parked close them and walked around checking out the shallow holes.

From the hill we could see some tailing's a short distance away so we drove over there to check it out. There we found the first actual mine shaft of the day.

Upon entering the cave we found it opened up into a fairly large room.

After crawling in and out of that cave we moved along following ATV trails in and out of gullies and over low hills.
We stopped for lunch in a wash out of the wind. After lunch we continued along a trail that eventually disappeared so we just continued in the same general direction without any trail to follow. We drove along some low ridges, through and across some deep washes and eventually found a trail.

On this track we passed an interesting quartz outcrop with a twin Saguaro's

and a large hedgehog cactus growing out of it.

From here we could see a large opening in a mountain to the north.

Finding a track that went close to this opening we parked and walked over to check it out. Most of the time these natural looking openings are very shallow. We were very surprised to find this cave was much larger than we expected.

Inside was a large cavern that looked like a natural cave.

A hole in the roof of the cave let in lots of light.

Running through the cave and out of the roof hole was a PVC pipe that contained electrical lines. On top of the mountain we could see several antennas of some kind.
Of course we had to investigate the antennae so we got back in our rigs and drove around the side of the mountain until we found a rough rocky trail going up toward the antennas. When we got as high as we wanted to drive. we were found a small shed.

There were more antennas higher on the hill. Dennis, Junior and Missy climbed to the top and found another shed that had some abandoned old fashioned electronic equipment inside.

Apparently this had been some kind of communications repeater station.
From here we continued west along a trail that turned out to be the one that I was originally looking for.
The hour was late so we didn't have time to follow it all the way around the mountains but we did go a few more miles and found several more mines but most were very shallow one that looked promising from a distance turned out to be filled with water.

We turned around here and headed back toward the highway.

On the way we checked out a couple more caves. One was very shallow but the other went back about 30 feet.


We got back to the trucks around 4:30 and headed for home.
Here is the map.

This was a very fun trip and opened up even more possibilities for exploration.