Wednesday February 26, 2014 The Needles Eye, AZ.
A jeeping we will go
Today, I had a jeep trip planned, or some other people did and I was going along for the ride. I met Marty at his place in Quartzsite just before nine AM and we headed out to the Quartzsite fire department where we were to meet the rest of the jeeps going on this outing.
We were the last ones there so we headed on north on Highway 95 to Parker and then on up just past the Bill Williams River. We crossed the bridge on the river and turned right where all the RV’s are boon docking up there near the highway. I don’t know the name of the place, but we turned right and headed up the main dirt road away from all the RVers.
Headed for the Needle’s Eye
I’m not sure how to tell you exactly where it is, but it seemed like it was only a few miles from the highway into the place with no hard jeeping stuff. I’m sure you could find directions on the internet somewhere to get to this interesting place. And I’m not sure if it’s called the Needle’s Eye or the Eye of the Needle. No way for me to check right now sitting in my van with no internet access out here in the boonies.
Air Down your tires
This is our group of Jeeps. We’ve just turned off the main highway, just below the town of Lake Havasu. We stopped so anyone that wanted to, could air down their jeep’s tires to around twenty pounds or so. Notice that most of the guys are doing this. It does at least two things. It helps get traction on the rocks and softens the ride a lot. It helps tremendously getting though soft sand without getting stuck.
Actually, this is a good tip
If you fine yourself sinking in the soft sand and get stuck. Stop before you get buried up to your axles. Air down all your tires to around twenty pounds or if you don’t have a gauge, air them down so they bow just a little and now your tires should ride up on the sand instead of digging down with high pressure tires. Even four wheel drives can get stuck in sand if this is not done. When you get back on the highway, air them up again, or drive to a place you can. Much better than being stuck someplace.
On with this adventure
We headed to the Eye on a fairly good road, no bad jeep stuff,……….. I’d say about three miles or so and drove upon a ridgeback to the Eye.
The road in, a bit dusty, but that’s jeeping.
The Eye
The eye of the needle is up on a ridge and the road is narrow, but in good shape. This is our group just as we arrived. The Eye is in the rock in the background which is just a short hike up to it. It’s a bit tight, but doable.
Here we are scrambling up to the Eye.
There’s more
And here we are at the Eye of the Needle, but there’s more. See the lady at the right, she’s about ready to dive through the Eye to get to the other side, which is well worth doing believe me. It’s part of the adventure. And I was nice and not showing you a picture of her butt going through the Eye. :O)
Here is a close up of the Eye. The little ladder does help get you through the Eye, but it is a a bit of a crawl, which most anyone can do if you made it this far.
You need to go through the Eye
Magical, don’t you think?
Here’s why you want to go through the Eye. This is at the other side, with the guy on the left coming through the Eye. Real touristy up here, see all our group is taking pictures. Most of us have been up here before. It’s a hard place to not take a bunch of pictures, it’s a magical place, don’t you think?
We stayed awhile taking pictures and shooting the bull some too, as jeepers do, sorta like fishermen. :O)
To get back out, you have to go back through the Eye, which the guy is doing in this picture, while the others contemplate their turn coming up.
The bubbly stuff
I’m not sure what formed these bubbly things, but they do look neat.
One more picture of the bubbly stuff. You need to see it in person.
We’re just getting ready to head on back down the short trail in this picture. One last admire. See the little bucket in the picture? That’s a Geocache, so the Geocache people have this place marked too. And it’s interesting that I didn’t see a single person of the group, except me, open it and look in, even though it was sitting right out there in the open. I have to admit though, that there was enough other interesting stuff to look at.
Here we are heading back down the short trail to the rigs and you can get an idea of the ridge we drove up to get to this point.
I made it up and back with my sprained ankle, so the trail isn’t too bad, just have to take it easy and not slip.
Lunch time
So far we haven’t done any serious jeeping. But it was lunch time so we headed down to Lake Havasu by the dam and found this nice place to have lunch, which we did. Anyplace like this is a nice find in the desert.
Serious jeeping
Ok, enough messing around, let’s get to some serious jeeping as that’s one of the reasons we came up to this area. We headed out and entered the road to the Desert Bar. I was in the red jeep with Marty and we were following Denis in the white Jeep and Dick in his Jeep Cherokee. Marty and I figured we could go anywhere that Cherokee could go,………. and he could go, as we found out. :O)
We’d been out with these guys before. I knew a few little rocks wouldn’t slow them down much, so I knew we were going to try to get through some challenging roads, which we did.
Here we are cruising up a wash following the blue Cherokee.
We came to some rocks. Denis in the white jeep cruises right through and so does the Cherokee and so we followed in the red jeep.
Some places were rougher than others, but that blue Cherokee kept getting through, so we followed. Actually, Marty followed as I was mostly out hobbling around on my sprained ankle taken pictures.
I mean really, who’d want to be a passenger riding through this stuff? Talking about getting jerked around. :O)
There was a lot of old mining remains in the area and we came across this old dump truck and boys will be boys. Vroom, Vroom. :O) Can you imagine yourself driving this big truck, proudly around the mining area in the olden days? Vroom, Vroom.
We were in the area of the Desert Bar, but on side roads around the area, just scouting around. We followed Gene through these rocks.
We ran out of rough roads
We finally ran out of rough roads and it was getting nap time, so we headed back out to the main road. Marty stopped to air back up and Denis pulled up beside us and he was just about ready to get back on the main road when I signaled them that they had a flat tire, well, almost flat.
So, he got out the spare and the tools and changed the flat tire, while we supervised him, to make sure he did it right, of course. Interesting, the female just gets to stand around watching and making sure he does it right and maybe take a few pictures too. She did her job well.
We all gave him a hard time, but he got the job done just the same and we all headed south, back to Quartzsite.
Marty and I headed back to his place where we looked at today’s pictures. Then I headed over to the Quartzsite library, where I checked my email and read a few blogs and checked the weather report.
After that, I headed out for my usual camp site on Sun Kist road where I’m at for the night.
Plans
There is a chance there might be a little rain coming in Friday and Saturday, so I’m going to head down to the Kofa Refuge.
My plan is to go down to Palm Canyon and stay for the night and then continue down to Horse tank for a few days hoping it will rain while I’m there. I was hoping to do quite a bit of hiking in the area, but with my sprained ankle, I may have to just do a lot of sitting around and taking it easy? I have one cave I want to explore from my last trip though and I may just have to hobble on up to it?
I’ll post this blog tomorrow at the Quartzsite library, then it will be a few days before I get back to post my blogs, maybe Monday? I write daily, but can not post until I get internet access as this ol van doesn’t have that.
A nice adventurous type day.
