02-13
A few days ago a rain storm came through and left in its wake a nice double rainbow.

Today we took a ride to "Crystal Hill" to see if there were any roads going around that small mountain.

Although the topo map from "Map Source" showed several roads, what tracks we found were closed off with "No Jeep" signs on them.
After driving through the parking area and campground a few times, we headed back toward Hwy95.

When we got to within a half mile of the highway we came to a road heading north. I had been curious about where the road went for some time so we turned onto it driving past the "El Paso Natural Gas" compressor building and on out the road until we came to a "T".
We turned to the right (east) and followed it for some time. The trail skirted the "Kofa Refuge". There were a few tracks turning off to the left but we kept going until we came to the area of the Livingston Mine. The Livingston mine is right on the northern border of the Refuge, and about two miles north of Crystal Hill. The old mine covers a large area with a lot of quartz outcrops and a few shafts.

We followed the trail passed large groups of barrel cactus's

and the first Ocotillo blooms we have seen this year.

The trail ended on the side of a mountain.
Retracing out path we passed the mining area and then turned right to follow a road going further east. The trail went up and over a very steep mountain.

On one of ridges with a super view we passed a memorial plaque.


At the summit (2600 ft) I took a picture of our back trail.

The pictures never look as rough as the actual road.
It took us a couple of hours to find our way out of the mountains.

We passed the a cabin that the locals call the "mailbox cabin".
There are pictures of the cabin in one of my previous blogs. I believe I called it the Apache Chief B&B.
I was trying to find a particular road that would bring us to Quartzsite the back way but after driving around for a while I gave up and headed for Interstate 10 and home.

It was a fun ride with some challenging trails.
We got back to "Plan B" around 4:45.