Wednesday, Mar. 20, 2013, Ajo, AZ.
We headed for Marble Mountain today in the jeep
Friends had told us there was a mountain made out of marbles down here. Naturally, I had a picture in my mind of all these shiny marbles laying around on a mountain, maybe not very realistic.
We did research.
We did our research and set off this morning, around nine am, in Marty’s jeep to find it. It was Marty, Patti and me in the back.
From the RV park, we headed south on highway 85, just south of Ajo a couple miles. There we turned onto Pipe line road, which was a road that followed a high pressure gas line east from here. The directions said to head east on pipeline road for seventeen miles, then turn left for about a mile, stop and hike a couple hundred feet to the marbles.
Pipeline road was very scenic.
Below is a picture of the pipeline road just past where it left highway 85 heading east.
Below is more of the pipeline road as we continued east.
There were some California poppies along the route as you can see below.
Some parts of the road were fairly rough.
Sometimes the road got fairly rough as we went up and over a mountain to get there.
Below you can see one of the rougher sections of road.
More rough roads along the way pictured below.
Marble Mountain was a hill.
After we left the pipeline road, we traveled about another mile and came to a pond area with no water. We parked there and got out and looked for the marbles. It turned out it was the hill just to the left of the dry pond area.
Below is a picture of marble Mountain, as seen from the dry pond area.
Marbles were in the rock.
After looking around some, we found there was a layer of rock around the mountain just over half way up. There were a lot of these little round rocks imbedded in the rock with a lot of them broken loose and on the ground just below the rocks.
The picture below shows the rocky layer that was full of these little round marble rocks.
The picture below is a close up view of the marbles in the rock. I picked up a pocket full of these marbles, which I failed to get a picture of. Most of the marbles where a half inch to an inch in diameter.
Added August 24, 2013
I finally got around to getting some pictures of the marbles.
Here’s some of them. I buffed some of them up a bit.
A closer look at a couple of them. The one on the right, I buffed most of the while outer covering off. The one on the left I only buffed a bit and you can still see some of the white outer covering.
Lunch at the dry pond.
After exploring this hill we had lunch in some trees by the dry pond which you can see below.
Below is a picture of the first cactus flowers I’ve seen on this trip.
On the way home I took the picture below of some of the scenery of the area.
It was a good adventure in the desert today.
We got home around four pm, tired an worn out and ready for a nap.
An interesting ride in the desert.
Had a good day.
