Hey friends, welcome back to Grand Adventure!
I'm your host Marc Guido, and this week we're going to share
some of the best moments from our Q23 Rally,
which took place last week in Quartzsite, Arizona.
We'll share pot luck meals, put some marshmallows and pie irons in the fire,
see the sights around Quartzsite during the RV Show,
journey to Yuma to explore the Arizona Territorial Prison,
and of course relax with friends old and new around the campfire, so stay tuned.
Grand Adventure live from Quartzsite, Arizona!
The Q23 Rally in southwestern Arizona's Sonoran Desert
was co-sponsored by Grand Adventure, Traveling Robert,
Rambling Voyage and Worth Every Mile.
Close to 100 RV'ers gathered near Quartzsite,
boondocking on BLM land in the La Posa South Long Term Visitor Area (LTVA)
for good times, good food and good friendships.
Let's take a few minutes to share some visual highlights of the week with you.
Following a quick ad break to pay the bills,
we'll bring you along for a visit to historic Yuma,
and the BLM's Imperial Dam Long Term Visitor Area
across the Colorado River in California.
We caravanned with Living Our Journey 365 and our West Virginia friends Sue and Jim
about 90 minutes south of Quartzsite,
to the Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park,
located a mere six miles from the Mexican border.
Opened while Arizona was still a U.S. territory,
the prison accepted its first inmate in 1876.
For the next 33 years more than 3,000 prisoners, including 29 women,
served sentences there for crimes ranging from murder to polygamy.
Well-known inmates included train robbers Bill Downing and Burt Alvord,
murderer "Buckskin Frank" Leslie,
legendary stagecoach robber Pearl Hart,
Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón,
outlaw Pete Spence from the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,
and Mormon pioneer William J. Flake.
The prison was under continuous construction with labor provided by the prisoners,
and eventually outgrew the small tabletop
overlooking the Colorado River upon which it was built.
In 1909, the last prisoner left the Territorial Prison
for the newly constructed Arizona State Prison Complex located in Florence, Arizona.
The prison earned its nickname "the Hell Hole,"
possibly due to cells with little ventilation during the scorching summertime temperatures,
but more likely due to the prison's dark, windowless solitary confinement cell.
Actor Russell Crowe's character was headed for the Hell Hole in the movie "3:10 to Yuma".
Nevertheless, as far as late 19th Century prisons go,
conditions at Yuma were pretty good, including electric lighting,
although cells had no indoor plumbing.
Two-foot-thick adobe walls, studded with chunks of granite
kept most of the prisoners contained.
Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park is one of the Yuma Crossing and Associated Sites
in the Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area.
Here the Colorado River narrows between two massive granite outcroppings,
providing the safest crossing point for a thousand miles.
The Ocean-to-Ocean Highway Bridge opened in 1915
as the only highway bridge across the Colorado River for 1,200 miles.
Here at Pivot Point Plaza, a restored 1907 Baldwin steam locomotive
sits at the exact site where the first railroad train entered Arizona in 1877.
In 1850, a military post was established at Yuma,
and following rich placer gold strikes on the Colorado River,
a gold rush and accompanying economic boom ensued in 1858.
Downtown Yuma today is an inviting collection of historic buildings,
art galleries, restaurants and microbreweries,
while the irrigated farmlands surrounding Yuma are an agricultural paradise
for growing lettuce, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, herbs, root vegetables,
dates, melons and lawn grass.
That agriculture has contributed to today's Colorado River
becoming a mere trickle of what it once was.
Imperial Dam, completed in 1938,
straddles the California-Arizona border 20 miles north of Yuma,
and diverts Colorado River water to southeastern California, Arizona and Mexico.
It's here on the California side that the BLM operates
another 3,500-acre Long-Term Visitor Area (LTVA)
similar to those in Quartzsite,
allowing campers to spend up to seven months
from September 15th to April 15th for a $180 permit fee.
And if you're a military buff,
don't miss the armanent display at the Yuma Proving Grounds
en route back to Quartzsite.
So we had a ball down at Q23
and we're pretty sure that everybody else in attendance did, too!
We're already hatching plans for Q24,
so if this looked like a good time to you,
we would love to have you join us for Q24 in Quartzsite, Arizona
coming up January 20th to 28th, 2024,
again coinciding with the Big Tent week, the RV Show in Quartzite.
Keep a close eye on our channel,
we will have more details forthcoming as they start to take shape.
We rushed back here to Utah to get to Salt Lake City
in advance of an approaching winter storm
and we barely made it! Talk about good timing,
we got here within 15 minutes of the first flakes starting to fall.
But behind that storm is the coldest air that we've been experiencing all year.
It was 7º F outside when I got up this morning
and found that our water was not coming out of the faucets.
Despite a heated hose,
and despite all of our water connections being in an enclosed wet bay
where I have an oscillating desktop ceramic heater
to also help keep everything nice and warm and toasty down there,
our water pressure regulator and our water filtration system were both frozen solid.
Turns out they're a little too close to the baggage door
and they're sitting in that wet bay tray
that's nothing more than a thin sheet of plastic separating it from the outside air.
I'm going to add some closed cell foam insulation to that little tray
to try and make it a little easier to try and keep the cold out and the warm in,
and I'm hoping it works
because it's going down to about 3º F tonight. Brrrrrr!!!
God, I'm getting cold just thinking about it
and missing that warm Arizona sunshine down in Quartzsite.
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