Sunday, Feb. 17, 2013, Quartzsite, AZ.
We were headed to the Cinnabar Mine today.
I was up at 8:30 this morning. After getting something to eat, I headed over to Marty and Patti’s as we were going on a jeep ride to the mine today, which was south of Quartzsite off of highway 95 south of here a few miles.
I was camped illegally again last night.
On the way out of last nights camp, I checked what the sign said on the way into the road where I was camped and it said. State land trust area, enter with a permit only, darn it’s hard to do things right around here. People were camped here without permits, I’m pretty sure, so I guess this wasn’t being enforced, at least I hoped it was that way?
Ready to go Jeeping.
I made it over to Marty’s where he was getting his jeep ready for the ride. Turned out there would only be three jeeps this trip, just right, as too many jeeps cause more social type problems.
We left at eleven, headed down 95, where we turned off to the right to start our four wheeling trip.
Airing down the tires.
We pulled over as soon as we got to the four wheeling part of the trip and let some air out of the tires to make the ride softer as we were going to be bouncing over a lot of rocks.
Below, you can see the three jeeps that went on this trip letting air out of the jeep tires.
It was quite a ways into where the mine was, but a pleasant road.
A pleasant type road.
Below, you can see part of the road into the mine.
Lots of saguaro cactus on the way as you can see below.
The Cinnabar Mine.
We drove for a couple hours and finally got to the mine. Below, we just arrived at the mining area. Below, you can see one of the big furnaces they used to extract the mercury from the ore.
Below is a pic of the furnace and the jeeps.
Time for lunch.
We got our chairs out and had lunch there and I looked around a bit.
Below, is us having some lunch.
Back to Quartzsite for dinner.
After a short time there, we packed up and headed back to Quartzsite, where we went out to a nice dinner of fish and chips at the Grub Steak which was very tasty.
We had a nice day jeeping and a nice dinner too.
Maybe some gold mining tomorrow?
Tomorrow, Marty’s jeep has to go back to the shop to finish off the exhaust leak problems, so maybe we’ll go out to watch a guy named Bill do some gold mining, near here.
Nice day today.