"Lost" at The Rolls

I kind of halfway decided to go looking for Whirpool rock again on Sunday. As usual, though, I got a late start. Not entirely my fault, though. I had a migraine aura and had to wait for that to go away before I could do anything. So I loaded up the ATV and headed out to Butcher Jones. I went there because it's close. The bad thing about it is that the gate closes at sunset.

My plan was to go further down 1829, all the way to its southern end. Click here to see a map of the roads out there.

At the beginning of the outing, I came across a patch of Mexican gold poppies.

A few years ago, I got a very nice picture of gold poppies and blue lupines on the hillside in the photo below. That hillside doesn't look as nice now, though. Maybe it's just the amount and timing of rain.

Or maybe it's stuff like this:

Also, people have been riding in a lot of places that they shouldn't be. Like this:

In some cases, it might be hard to tell what is a road and what isn't, but when you drive through a torn down fence, that should tip you off. Some people are oblivious, though. Here's a picture of oblivious people.

I was standing there taking pictures of all this desecration and started to feel like I was working on a National Geographic article (not based on the quality of the pictures, though). That bummed me out and I decided to move on. Then I started taking pictures of the unfortunate saguaros that are next to the roads.

If they don't get shot, they get run into.

I think that one was attacked with an ax or something, too.

I took a few pictures of nice stuff, too.

I took pictures of signs marking the roads along the way. I thought to myself, "It's obvious where the roads are". Silly me.

Here's a bullet riddled car at the intersection of 1829 and 1844. When I came by here later, there were a couple of vehicles stopped here and a bunch of guys standing around and shooting the trashed car. It was pretty funny.

By the time I got to the end of 1829, it was getting late. I decided to take a shortcut back to where the truck was parked. I would take 1844 to 1830 to 1814 to 1813. Getting on 1844 was easy. It had a sign that hadn't even been shot up yet. That'w where the easy part ended. It wasn't long before I realized that I was going in the wrong direction in the wrong place and there was no sign of 1830. I was doing everything I could to avoid using the shortcuts people had make, but I couldn't tell what was road and what wasn't. There weren't any signs and the only map I could find (see link above) isn't detailed enough to find out where you really are. I could see the road I wanted to be on, but as I drove back and forth, I was having a heck of a time figuring out how to get there. The sun continued to sink. Remember where I parked? The gate closes at sunset. Here's a map of my wanderings. You can see that for a while I followed the roads.

If so many people hadn't gone where they should not have, it would have been easy to get where I wanted to go. As it was, I wandered around out there with all the other yahoos, tearing up the desert. Next time I'm out there, I think I'll try to map the roads I was trying to find. I'd better get an early start.

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