A Quartzsite Christmas and the Trigos

Rich Hill has snow! So we moved over to Quartzsite just in time, although its been a bit cold in the 50’s and raining once in a while. Our friends Jane and John took us to a rock hunt Friday with a church group. The “bacon” was made of different layers, including barite, and had formed in a stringer that ran through the top of a rock outcrop. I scrambled around the mountain, gathered a bagful, and marked that spot. John and Elizabeth drove from Wyoming to visit us and Elizabeth’s mom in Tucson for Christmas. Of course, being geologists, they wanted to find rocks and of course, I remembered where we went with the rock club. Their truck squatted a little from the big samples! Bailey, their dog, posed for us perfectly, even placing her ball just right! Ron and John went metal detecting for gold the next day, and Elizabeth and I looked for quartz crystals. A good time, but not much success! They left us for Tucson and we enjoyed calling family and friends and a wonderful dinner at the church. I made quilts for Ron’s granddaughters for Christmas and I think they really liked them. Katelynd does Cowboy Mounted Shooting with her dad, grandpa and mom, and so I designed her quilt around that. I took pictures of them and made them into the silhouettes in the borders. Myra’s smaller Kitty Quilt was quite a challenge for me since it has matched stripes and stretchy triangles in the border. Christmas morning dawned with God’s beautiful sunrise, and we even got to prospect for gold a bit despite the rain and cold. Thank goodness the Navy finally moved David out from boot camp and approved his eyesight. So he flew from Chicago to South Carolina the Saturday before Christmas, checked into his new quarters at the Navy’s A School, then flew out Sunday for Sioux Falls. Bad weather forced his plane to land at Omaha, so Joanna and two of their good friends drove through the snow and wind from Rapid City to Omaha to pick him up. So glad they made it okay! We’re hoping you all had a wonderful Christmas with your families and friends, too.

Since I haven’t had internet access for a couple of weeks, I’m including our adventure over to the Trigo Mountains, 20 miles south of I-10 right on the border between California and Arizona. We left Quartzsite the Sunday after Christmas week with our friends John and Jane to camp on the BLM ground here. We drive our ATVs 3 ½ miles to the gold claim every morning through the “braided” wash (I never realized what that meant until we tried to pick out a path through it – it crisscrosses every which way and we have a hard time repeating our journey from day to day – one day it was 5.5 miles instead of 3.5!) We carry a GPS all the time now. It’s warmer here and a gorgeous place. The cute little barrel cactus, an ironwood tree that looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book, and the mountains with the hole in the farthest peak (the “needle’s eye”) look amazing. The skittish and very wild burros were braying across the wash this morning; we counted 8 of them. Ron has been very happy – he’s found 4 gold nuggets here so far. Again, a wonderful sunrise today; the weather is changing and I can actually smell the ocean as the winds shift to the south.