Tuesday, November 08, 2016

Change Is Good

Instead of turning right out of North Ranch Escapees RV Park toward Congress (AZ), our motorcycle gang turned left on AZ 89 toward Vulture Peak (on right).

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Vulture Mine Road took us south through Wickenburg.

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A family emergency kept Doug and Jan from joining us.  Brock and Leola and Smiley completed our group for the day.

I took this shot blindly over my shoulder.  Not bad.

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Vulture Mine Road winds gently through the Vulture Mountains,

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past Vulture Peak (north face view),

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and the Vulture Mine, which is open for tours.

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As we descended the mountains we entered the Tonopah Valley, a land of saguaro and cholla at the upper elevations (1900’).

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Vulture Mountain—southern face.

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Riding through the changing desert scenery, we gently descended toward our lowest elevation—around 1300’.  The sun brought out the colors of the desert, the breeze was cool.  The only drawback of the ride was that after we entered the Valley the roads were pretty much straight.

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We passed less cactus, more Palo Verde trees and shrubs, then less vegetation and more dust and small rocks.

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Vulture Mine Road continued across Aguila Road, but quickly turned into gravel. We turned east (left) at this point.

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A very large array of solar panels, now facing east.

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Tonopah Valley High School.

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We made two stops on our ride.  The first was at Saddle Mountain RV Park.  We are considering spending the month of January here and stopped to get some information and do a ride around.

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Tomorrow we’ll finish our ride.

Louise and Duane

1 comment:

where's weaver said...

That was a nice ride. You do pretty good, Louise, shooting over your shoulder.