Tonopah, Arizona

Funny, when one’s mind starts to go down a track it becomes very focused.  We are visiting my mother in law in Peoria, Arizona over the Memorial Day weekend.  While visiting her, my husband wanted to take a side trip to check out one of the many BLM lands Arizona has to offer.

For those unfamiliar with the term it stands for Bureau Land Management.  These are government owned lands.  Our government allows us to stay on the land for 14 days. Sounds like a great deal if you want to camp for free.  Here’s the catch.  There are no facilities – at all.  No water, no electricity no nothing.  You need to bring it all.  People who camp on this land have solar or generators and need to bring their own water.

My husband decides to take my MIL and I for a road trip to visit Saddle Mountain to scope out this BML land.  It takes an hour to get there and if you didn’t have a GPS you would probably pass it by as it looks like all the other vast desert fauna we saw getting there.

We venture off the road and begin to see areas where past RVers have stayed.  Firepits made of the available stones and trodden areas where many rigs visited the area.  My husband wanted to get closer to the mountain and as we did the terrain became rockier and trodden areas disappeared and was replaced with tumbleweed, cacti and more rocks.

There was not one RV, probably due to the fact it was 98 degrees.  I looked around and thought to myself, this was not going to be something I would be jazzed about. My MIL didn’t help as she begin to give warnings about bobcats, scorpions and snakes. On the complete opposite side of the spectrum was my husband who just kept saying, “Can’t wait to get the road, this is going to be one grand adventure.”

I reserve the right to delay my opinion until we actually stay on the BML land but in the meantime, you have to admit the view is spectacular!