Yet another dippy road

11/21/2018   Elevation 213

About 7:20 we pulled out of West Shores RV Park, Sultan City CA after spending 2 nights there. Turning south towards the Mexican border, about 50 miles away, we backtracked our sightseeing route from yesterday.

We started off by again passing miles and miles of hard light brown earth with scattered bushes. Flat near by and mountains off in the distance, the Sultan Sea was between us and the mountains on the left.

Nearing the southern point of the Sea we entered the farming area and passed miles and miles of pancake flat irrigated fields. The fields here are much larger than the ones outside of Yuma AZ that we passed last year.

It’s planting time, all the fields were either being worked or freshly planted with bright sunshine reflecting off hundreds of sprinklers spraying a fine mist of precious water on the seedlings.

Continuing on to new territory we made a Wally World stop to stock up on supplies. This time we went through the regular checkout lane. Strangest thing I have ever seen I do believe, a Walmart with NO, zip, none, nada Walmart bag in sight. You put your stuff on the belt, the cashier scans it puts on the thing that at one time held the bags, you put it back in your cart, then you get frisked when you leave. Now it’s more like Sams Club. How you get it home and in the house after that……. That’s your problem.

Leaving WW  we were still in farming country we passed, guess what, more miles and miles of flat irrigated fields.

The route to our to our next spot had us turning east then north east once we passed the tip of the Sea. A few miles east of Walmart the farms ended, the landscape changed from flat fields to hills, then almost like someone drew a line we entered the sand dunes.

Now when I really think of a desert, this is what I think of, sand dunes, no vegetation, just sand dunes.

In doing research on where we wanted to stay, this was on the list but from what I could tell, you had to buy a permit, not a real problem but not cost effective because we only wanted to stay 1-2 nights and the permit valid for 2 weeks. Long story short I’m glad we passed on staying there, busy -busy -busy, campers and motorhomes everywhere. Not to mention all manner of dune buggies along with all kinds of contraptions built to play in the sand.

We did stop at a very crowded and busy overlook, with the exception of the road for a good distance you looked in any direction it was nothing but sand, and the off road vehicles of course.

I also found out this is the area where a lot of the desert scenes for Star Wars was shot.

Traveling on we came to “The Dippy Road”.  On the other dippy road most of the dips were 4-8 feet tall these were another story. Some of them were huge, as in stories tall.

The speed limit Was 65 but I stayed down around 50. There’s nothing like coming to the top of a 2 – 3 story tall hill, what they were calling a dip, and seeing a set of chrome smoke stacks heading for you. And some of them were so tight you could see spots in some of the valleys from the end of long vehicles dragging on the road, the backend was still coming down when the front end starts going up. Go fast enough and you might just launch yourself into outer space.

When they made the roads they just followed the contours of the ground, with warning signs about flooding in the bottoms of the dips. No culverts, no small bridges, no excavating of any kind, just followed the contours of the land.

We gained elevation also at one point over 1000 ft. Up into the mountains we went. Now here at the top, the ground is flat again with humongous fields but these are not all neat and tidy like the ones near the Salton Sea.  There are also several fields of cotton here, it looks like they are just starting to pick it. I wanted to get some pictures but they were never near the road as we went by.

One interesting note, they grow a lot of hay. By here I mean the entire southwest. Now it’s also possible some of it is some kind of spice, whatever it is, it’s alfalfa colored bales. They bale it in the Paul Bunyan sized square bales. We have also seen several semi’s loaded with what looks like wheat, again in the massive square bales, but we have not seen any wheat fields around.

While it may sound like we drove a million miles today, we only drove around 110 miles.

This was before we reached the big dips