03-22-10

Yesterday, Suzanne, Roy, Patti and I went back to the Ramsey Mine road.
On the way we noticed the wild flowers in full bloom.

Roy was trailering their Rhino so we stopped at the Kiosk on the south side of the freeway so they could unload. From there we followed a frontage road east until we came to an intersection, where we turned south, into the mountains.

We drove around the east side of "Twin Peaks". As we traveled up a particular wash I noticed some tailing's along the side.

We stopped to investigate and found a vertical shaft that of course we had to drop some rocks into. It was very, very deep.
Further along, we turned onto a trail that led to a large mining area.

I think it was a copper mine because of all the blue-green rock scattered about. I think the rock is called "Crisacola" (I'm not sure of the spelling)


Clifford was finally defeated by a hill.
We were going south after leaving the blue/green rocks when we came to this very, very steep hill that was all broken shale and some steps in the middle of it. I thought it was going to be a challenge when we started up it. When we got to the steps Clifford could not get enough traction on the shale to get over them. We tried several times but just kept spinning the wheels in the loose rock. I tried going around the steps with out success. Finally I backed down to the bottom of the hill. I guess I could have tried storming up the hill but I didn't want to take a chance of breaking some thing.
The picture doesn't even come close to showing how steep the hill is.

Or how high the steps were.

We turned around and went back down to the wash where we stopped in the shade of a Palo Verdi tree for lunch.
After lunch we followed the wash further south but after a short distance we came to the "New Water Mountains Wilderness" boundary.
So, even if we could have gotten over the steps we couldn't have gone very far before we would have come to the wilderness boundary on the other side of the hill.
We headed back down the wash and tried some other trails that all came to dead ends. As we rounded the north end of the mountains we got another view of the "Eagles Eye"

At a distance one of the mountains look like it had a water fall coming off it.
Once we got closer (at the wilderness boundary) we could see that it was a vertical seam of lighter material on the darker background rock.

Patti got some more nice macro shots of very small flowers.

We got home around 4:30 and went to Silly Al's for dinner with Suzanne and Roy.
Here is the map;