Ajo AZ

2/6/2018  Elevation 1427

Pronounced AH-hoh. Ajo is the Spanish word for garlic (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈaxo]). The Spanish may have named the place using the familiar word in place of the similar-sounding O’odham word for paint (oʼoho). The Tohono O’odham people obtained red paint pigments from the area.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajo,_Arizona

We spent 4 nights abut 1/2 way between Quartzsite and Yuma, it was pretty quiet but disappointing. One of our explorations was in the last post. That was the best of our exploration of the area.

The map showed some mines in the area so we bounced back this 2 lane wide rough gavel road for over an hour, probably hour and 1/2 only to discover that the mines are on private property and you couldn’t get to them. With one exception while we explored a small side valley the drive was non-descriptive. The rough at times road was almost right down the middle of the desert between two jagged rocky mountain ranges but they were a few miles away. After a few miles the road made a sharp left more of the same only now with a gradual uphill to the mines and mountains.

On 2/4/2019 we moved around 40 miles to just out side of Yuma for the night so we could get some RX and restock. We spent the night on some BML land. It was a small crowded area, people were parked ever which way. I’m not sure why the spot was so popular, besides being crowded, some people were running generators off and on, The road was peetty busy and so was the train track, both were next to a hill which really bounced the noise towards us. Glad we only spent 1 night there.

So, we left Yuma bright and early for the 100 mile trek, we’re wanting to slow down and only move 25-75 miles at a time, but there is NOTHING between Yuma and Gila Bend except mostly barren desert, cows, probably dairy, you can smell them even though the barns are well off in the distance then there are the hay(?) fields, something greeen, looks like grass being grown in large flat fields watered with water sucked from the Colorado river, miles and miles away.

The gradual up hill climb and wind did nothing for our milage. The road looks mostly level but watching the Elevation on the GSP it is slowly but surely going up.

There is a cold snap coming in and we need to do some laundry so we thought it would be a good excuse to hook up to some shore power for a while.

We arrived in Gila Bend early in the day only to discover that the intended park is full. Didn’t  expect that so make up plan B real quick.

Onward we go, another 50 miles, due south to the town of Ajo AZ, looks like we’re going to sit out the cold spell off the grid after all. It was spitting rain and more rain possiable.

WonderMaps sucks at giving accurate rain predictions,  it can get tricky gettin in or out of the desert when it’s wet and soft, not wanting to try that we found a no hookups spot at a golf course. It’s flat and solid. We’re going to spend 2 nights here before moving on. We’re well off the beaten path it’s quite as can be with the exception of a noisy turtle dove.

What’s this? All these words and the dang fool is still typing.

The cold snap will have the temp near freezing, 33 degrees, and cool durning the days …. UCK!!!!!

We drove through here last year with the Jeep, today besides laundry we are going to explore the town a little……… more on that later.

First stop was the tourist info place, that poor lady needs to get out more and have better knowledge of things on the maps she gives out. We never did find one of the things, a supposed lybrath, on the map that the overly creative artist marked. Also on the map they gave all of these creative names to side road/ trails, the problems was the map was so out of proportion you couldn’t tell if you on the marked road or not. The artist should have taken a couple of extra minutes and marked in the numbers that the BLM uses.

There is a LARGE copper pit mine next to the town. I forgot how deep it is but  it’s a mile and 1/2 across, kinda deep to. It was in operation until foreign copper became cheaper than American, now it’s to expensive to mine. There is still a lot of copper here and one day it will be mined.

They used train cars to bring the ore out of the mine. When the mine closed down they removed over 300 miles of train track. When/if the mine reopens they will use the latest technology to get it out of the ground, currently that would be a conveyor belt, not the big trucks as I expected.

For reasons that I don’t fully understand, the pure copper was pushed over the side, as tailings, something about not being able to process the ore unless it had impurities in it. Now they have the technology to process the pure ore and if the mine ever reopens that would be the first thing processed.

After our stop at the mine we drove what they call the scenic road, getting board with that real fast we hopped on a side road that wound us around a peak, coming back out almost where we left the scenic road.