How nice to wake up and have a decent semi-private bathroom. The lady at the check-in station had mentioned, when she realized I was undecided about staying, that "we have nice bathrooms" and they were.
The busy quail were puttering all over. All the trees had naming plaques with genus and species, so I am learning the common ones like mesquite, creosote, various cacti, along with some non-native specimens. Most of the refuges also do this. The desert has an amazing variety of plants adapted to arid conditions, many with gorgeous blooms in certain seasons. I think it might be a digital thing: people either see the beauty of a desert or don't. And deserts present in different ways; not all are like the Sahara which was always my generic desert.
I now knew where Bill Williams was but first pulled off into the auto-tour trailhead, Planet Ranch Road. I had read about this and didn't plan to drive it as I would need a 4W vehicle.
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| Bill Williams NWR - Planet Ranch Road trailhead - AZ |
Bill Williams, for whom the river is named, was an interesting man, a "noted mountain man and frontiersman." He was a fur trapper, became a Protestant preacher, married an Osage woman, lived with both the Osage and Ute tribes, had two daughters, ... all this and more from Wikipedia. I need to find a book about his life.
The refuge is located where the river empties into the Lake Havasu Reservoir of the Colorado.
The pleasant young woman who greeted me had just started working here. It "took me 8 years" but she finally had worked up the NWR ladder to get this job. She mentioned several other refuges (mostly on the east coast and mostly ones I had visited) where she had worked in part-time positions as a bio-tech. She described two short nearby trails I could walk, right off the parking lot, but I never did find them. Unusual for a refuge. I had told her I couldn't even find the refuge yesterday. She said she was aware of that and was working on it. So this morning, confused again, I went back into the VC to now ask her about the non-obvious trails, but her office was dark. I just left and went to the McDonald's in Parker where I watched two handsome Native American men conversing in a corner booth.
I was on the CRIT reservation - Colorado River Indian tribes - the Mojave, Chemehuevi, Navajo and Hopi.
(I just read that a developer wants to build a huge tourist attraction - the Grand Canyon Escalade - at the confluence of the Little Colorado and Colorado Rivers, with an aerial tram going to the bottom of the canyon! Please check out www.bendbulletin.com on 12/04/2014. Search on Clashing Visions for Grand Canyon.)
Just south of the little town of Poston, there is a memorial for the 17,867 Japanese who were interned here during WWII, from May of 1942 to November of 1945.
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| Memorial to Japanese interned here for 3.5 years - Poston, AZ |
Perpendicular to the north-south road between Parker and Ehrenberg were roads going down to the Colorado, and I turned onto one, but two vehicles were slowly following me at a distance. I was moving from open fields and irrigation ditches to the brushy riparian area, so I turned around. When I passed them, they were stopped near a canal so were likely checking / regulating water flows...but with Nevada plates in dark Jeep-like vehicles???
I took another road a few miles south, through cotton fields, and watched a small group of egrets and four Sandhill Cranes, the ubiquitous Yellow-rumps, a Say's Phoebe, Red-winged Blackbirds, Kestrels and Coots, but was unable to actually reach the river. I surmise it's a Border Patrol decision to allow only limited access to this river. I could see white buildings at the end of the road with a large American flag.
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| Red-winged Blackbirds in the cotton - south of Parker, AZ |
Back to California when I reached I10 to Blythe where I mailed postcards and sat in a McDonalds for a couple of hours right behind a group of loud teenage girls whose thread of conversation was choosing a subject for debate from a list they had from their teacher. The word "cannabis" was not familiar to at least one girl but someone quickly explained. "You mean it's weed?" They were so typical, straying often from the debate debate to gossip, laugh, joke, tease, flirt....
I stayed at the truck stop in Ehrenberg right outside of the Best Western where I spent Friday and Saturday nights. Maybe because gas was cheaper or for other reasons that Arizona was better than California, this particular stop was busy with the usual travelers / truckers but also with homeless and/or hippie types hanging around under the umbrellas and at the few picnic tables on the little lawn outside of Wendy's....with dogs and guitars and long hair and dirty, rumpled, well-worn backpacks. The police stopped by often in impressive white SUVs.
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| Why agriculture works here - Colorado River water |
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