Before I could pull Robin away from the computer, she had bought land in Nevada and Arizona. Curse you E-Bay! Well, it was Mother's Day.

“Nooooo!” I squealed like a freshly castrated pig, “Stop while you still can! Think of the children’s college fund!”

“Can’t beat these prices.” The wife crossed those irresistable legs, took a drag on her cigarette, and swirled her Kenall-Jackson Chardonay while her stealy blue-gray eyes watched the bidding on-screen. “Surplus cash.”

Last Mother’s Day, Robin, my wife, lost it. She got on E-Bay and found land for sale.

“Ten acres for sale near Alamo Lake in Arizona! Spectacular View!"

Before I could haul her away from the computer, pleading for mercy, she’d bought twenty acres in Box Canyon, northwest Arizona, and forty acres in Northeast Nevada, Elko County.

When she first scored the Arizona land, I was thinking, okay, we always wondered about this bare-assed naked land for sale thing, how it works. Lets go see. Then she was going for Nevada, and I just couldn’t stop her.

This might be at least partially my fault. The first serious trip we did with the Bounder was Tombstone and Gilla Cliff Dwellings in New Mexico. We stayed at KOAs along the way. I made the comment that RV parks were nothing more than parking lots.

"I prefer to think of our Bounder as a mountain cabin on wheels," I opined, "Or maybe a desert shanty."

You just can't say things like that around impressionable young minds like my wife's without the danger of them fermenting into something intoxicating, or toxic.

A trip planned to go visit the Arizona land got cancelled when, as I was lining up our ‘vintage’ 1987 34’ Bounder to load the full-sized Bronco on the trailer, I saw fluid dripping out the side of the radiator.

Both properties would be inspected then, on the last week of June, us getting home July 3rd.

The plan was to cruise to the Barstow/Calico KOA Friday night, June 25th , then, bright and early Saturday, start a forced march on I-15 past Las Vegas, catch 93 up the east side of Nevada to Ely, and the KOA there. From there we'd be less than two hundred miles to our new property in Elko County. The property is 16 miles (As the Crow Flies) from a paved road, according to the topo map. The nearest towns are Cobre, Toano, and Montello. All are listed as ghost towns, although Montello, with a population of 78, should not qualify. It’s cemetery has a mystery, though, which we weren’t aware of at the time. Wished we’d checked.

Then, after inspecting the land there for two days, we’d cruise west on I-80, hit either 305 or 306 north, down through Austin to Tonopah, stay there for a night, maybe check out the Tonopah Gold Mine Museum. From there, we’d do another forced march down through Vegas, through Henderson, Searchlight, down to Laughlin, over to Kingman, either stay at the Kingman KOA or force-march to our property in Arizona, twenty acres, up Box Canyon. We would stay one or two days there, then head out for home, down through 93 to I-10, west to Quartzite, east on 93 again to Yuma, then I-8 home to El Cajon, California.

Let me quickly list the menagerie we’re dragging along here. Besides the wife and I, we have a nine year old son whose going on 16, a pair of three year old twins, and Thompson, the only sane one of the bunch, the dog, part greyhound, part Master of the Universe.

Friday night, the wife got home from work. Everything was loaded and ready to go. We headed north on 15 and got to Barstow 0’dark thirty. I didn’t hook up anything but the electricity.

Saturday morning, we blew out of Barstow just as soon as we could, although the kids did play in the KOA ‘ghost town’ playground. Did I mention that we’re hauling a 1990 Bronco on a flat bed trailer? The Bronco is a surplus national park ranger vehicle, with a huge straight six, a manual five speed transmission and an all manual 4x4 system. Serious off-roader with enough room inside for The Herd.

We shot through ‘Vegas, and were on 93 headed due north for four hundred miles long before noon. Beautiful country, extremely desolate, the Bounder occasionally pulling hard to the right. I had noticed this even before we’d left home. When we got the new radiator installed, I asked the mechanic to check the brakes and such on the passenger side front. He told me the tire and spring booster were both very low on air, that he’d filled them up. When I pulled it out of the repair shop, it seemed fixed.

There’s a highway, 375, that we started a short distance on, then turned off to hit, I think 318, that is called the Alien Highway. 375, gotta check that out sometime. The highway we turned down, 318 to 6, had a big sign that says, “no gas for the next 100 miles’. I looked down, I had half a tank. The last gas station we saw was behind us, and regular was going for $2.30. We kept going.

The sign should have read ‘NOTHING for the next 175 miles”. There was occasionally a fence line, sometimes a structure far off the road, a tumbled-down homestead dating from the 19th century, but other than that, NOTHING! And it was 175 miles, not 100. And we hit a head wind. And that gauge on the Bounder sits at half-a-tank forever, and then drops like a stone.

Robin does not appreciate how difficult it is to drive this damn thing, especially hauling the Bronco. Hauling the Cherokee, that was nothing. We blew down 8 doing 75 during the Tombstone Gilla Cliff Dwelling trip, but add a lousy 1500 pounds, and you can’t relax. Just keeping it in the lane is A challenge, you can’t break your concentration for a second.

And about 130 miles up this road, the needle dropped to ‘E’. We’re drained, and there’s no signs, no sign of signs, no reason for signs, because there’s NOTHING for a sign to point to.

Robin and I discussed what to do. Is it better to stop now before we run bone dry, or do we keep going, hoping to hit a gas station, one I’d expected to see thirty miles back. Robin is pissed with me, either for not divining this, not knowing exactly where the next town would be, or having brought our dilemma to her attention. (There were towns on the map, they just didn’t exist on the road)

Finally, we blow into this itty-bitty little town, Lund. There’s a store there with pumps alongside it. They’ve got one grade of gas, and its going for 3.019 a gallon.

“That’s outrageous,” I proclaim, “And he’s gonna get it!”

Only there’s an old truck sitting there at the pumps, and the guy behind the wheel glares at us as we start pulling off the road. He’s got both hands on the wheel, and there’s a look in his eyes that says, “I’m not going anywhere.” He’s not pumping gas, he’s just sitting there, glaring at us.

So I pull back up on the road. Now if we run out of fuel, I can grab the can and walk back instead of having to unload the Bronco, which also is not got that much gas. (Out here, half a tank is running low.)

But what’s there, not three miles north, but a full-blown truck stop. There’s not a soul in sight but the girl at the register. We pull in, throw in forty dollars at 2.099 a gallon, and are back on the road, getting to Ely right on schedule. So far the most exciting thing for the kids had been the playgrounds at the KOAs. We did take a pit stop at this one little place, but there was nothing there worth mentioning.

Next morning we leave Ely, fueling up at the Indian Reservation for 2.02. Don’t eat at the Red Apple in Ely unless you got time on your hands. Good food, but the whole place is operating on Very Slow mode.

Every time I hit the brakes, the Bounder pulls to the left, then drags after the braking to the right. Robin doesn’t want to hear about it, she wants to get to the forty acres.

It starts raining. It’s beautiful rain, it really is, running across another incredible stretch of nothingness and mountains capped with snow. Snow! Can you imagine? In late June. I hit the switch for the windshield wipers.

What do you expect when you throw that switch that’s marked ‘windshield wipers’? Well, I don’t know about you, but I expect the windshield wipers to start swishing back and forth so I can see the road.

Not this time. The wipers just sit there. I turn the switch off, try it again. No joy. I pull over, not too far from a sign that says something about ‘Spruce Mountain’.

The dog goes out for a pit stop, the kids go out for a pit stop, I pop up the console and check the fuse. It looks good, but I replace it anyway. That ain’t it. The rain stopped, we pulled out again, headed for a town called Wells. We stop at the Flying J in Wells, just off I-80 and fuel the Bronco up, for 1.89. Pulling out of the station we got a new noise. Robin doesn’t wanna hear about it. She’s hot to get to the property.

We take the freeway to highway 223 with Oasis at its offramp. Oasis looks like a ghost town. The hilltops are covered with pinyon pine, juniper, and a striking fir. Most of the terrain is bare or with that gray plant I have as yet to determine a name for, the dominant flora for the last two hundred miles we’ve covered. The Utah border is thirty miles further on the freeway, but we head up this lonely little highway. It seems any paved road qualifies as a highway.

I should’ve looked and checked the map, because the ghost town of Cobre, and the abandoned Nevada Northern railroad track that I’m looking for, is all of two, three miles north of Oasis. We drive thirty-five miles to Montello before I admit I’ve gone too far. It starts raining cats and dogs. I throw on the windshield switch. They don’t come on, but this time I leave the switch on, and after maybe three minutes, they start swishing! They haven’t stopped swishing since.

We come back to the track, have to overshoot them, turn around, find the dirt road we seek. We pull off the highway onto this wet dirt road and cruise at about five miles an hour for a couple miles. At one point we cross more tracks, these very active, with two sets of tracks, it’s so busy.

This dirt road is really in good shape, and we could have gone a lot further along it, but the puddles are getting deep.

“Pull in here,” Robin declares.

There’s some kind of structure about an eighth of a mile to our right, and I go ahead and pull up the road to it a ways. There’s lots of stuff laying around, the hood of a jeep. The gray plant is hip high. I stop before we get to the structure itself and walk up.

It’s a horse stable built from discarded railroad ties. We ended up seeing a lot of this. Since it doesn’t look like its been used in years, we decide to pull into this area. I start driving forward, but its hard. I’m dragging something. We get in position, drop the levelers. I go out to see what I was dragging, and it’s the front passenger wheel. It’s locked up.

My thought is; we’re here, we planned to be here two days. I’ll worry about a tow truck or whatever in two days.

So, we unload the Bronco, stow all the gear, lock up the Bounder, pile into the Bronco, and take off, hunting our forty acres.

Now the guy who sold us this forty acres, Thadeus Faethe, told us that he’d only recently bought this property from an elderly lady who had used it for camping. He’d warned us it was extremely remote, yet picturesque, and had given us a map, showing a slightly crushed square of land, roughly a half-mile east of something called Jogs Well.

One of the drawbacks of buying raw land is, it’s not been surveyed. The section map has been, which is like a mile by a mile, even more, it’s not always consistent, but the individual plots inside that section is not surveyed, and thus, not set in stone, up for interpretation, and most importantly, not physically marked on the ground.

I had petitioned, and Robin had allowed me, to purchase the TOPO! National Geographic program for Nevada and Arizona. This program has five levels of maps down to 7.5 topography maps for the whole state, and then the ability to zoom in four hundred per cent. It has a name locator, and the ability to measure by meters, foot, miles, percentages of miles, you name it. What I had done with the little map Thadeus Faeth had sent us of our property was to take it and match it up with the topo maps, align the lines, paste it in, and then take UTM readings at each corner. I double-checked my calculations with other bits of info Thad gave us. For instance, a square block of forty acres is ‘roughly’ a quarter mile by a quarter mile. I’d also gone trying to find out how expensive a survey would cost, found myself at the licensing boards for both the state of Arizona and Nevada. I kicked around the idea of trying to get trained and certified myself. There had to be a demand for this thing, right? One of the standards that must be met is that the survey of raw land must be within four inches. I would later measure the thickness of the lines on the map that I was using to determine my property lines, and they are no thinner than 28 feet across. And what do you measure by, the inside of the line, the outside? I decided to zoom in that four hundred per cent and measure right down the center of the line, which means I’m within potentially fourteen feet of my property line.

Of course surveyors have tools geared to meet the strict measurements necessary to map land, but I also read that one of the things you can’t do is survey your own land. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

I also ran off a ton of maps of the whole area. Thad had sent us directions to get to our land, but they got ‘displaced’. I still don’t know where they are. No matter, I had tons and tons of topo maps of our property and the surrounding property. I had two GPS units. One I loaded all the coordinates into. I then mapped out the roads to our property, chose a route, and programmed where to turn. Since I knew I’d be driving, and Robin has ridiculed my obsession with such things for years (“Do you know where ‘here’ is now?”) I figured I’d have to do all this myself.

What I wish I had done now is scored a laptop, loaded the program up, and gotten the gear that allows you to hook the GPS to the computer, so we could watch a little blip on the Topo map move along as we drove along. Maybe more useful, once you’re on site, you can note landmarks not obvious on the map, and use them to help you figure out your property lines.

We were so far out, I actually started having something of an anxiety attack. We hadn’t brought much water, hadn’t brought any food nor blankets. But I had brand spankly new Perelli Scorpion tires, extra wide, all around, and a full tank. What was my problem?

We came up on an area called Toano Well (Toana means ‘place of repose’ in Shoshone), and it looked like something from a spaghetti western. It was classic. The fence around the pen there was made from the local juniper branches woven together with wire. We continued north, and the road started falling apart. The cattle got thick.

Robin watched the GPS for me, and she announced “This thing says, we’re pulling away from our property now.”

After a little bit of fits and starts, I calculated we missed the road we should have turned on. We started back, and right where the machine says to turn, there’s nothing but a lot of cows.

The thing is, there is a road. Not a road you’d take, mind you, but there is a road, and it’s the road I marked for us to go to our property by.

“No way, Rob,” I tell her. “That’s not gonna work.”

Robin looked devastated. I pulled out the maps, and now the girl has an interest in them.

Back at Toano Well there had been a road that had looked especially appealing that also went east, but looking at the map, it wasn’t as direct as the road that we now knew didn’t exist.

But it was also getting late. We weren’t going to make it out to our property that day. Robin is now officially devastated. We drove the very long way back to the RV.

When I had parked the Bounder, I’d left the headlights on. There they are shining brightly at us as we approach camp. As quick as I get in to find out if, on top of everything else, the battery is dead. I twist the key, and it fires right up.

Robin had me start a fire in our fire kettle. I was torn as to whether I should make a fire ring and build a fire right on the ground, and decided against it. Back home, in all our haunts, a ground fire is a crime against God And Nature. Fire kettles are the rule of the Anza-Borrego Desert, and we have dragged this quaint tradition with us. I’m glad I didn’t try to start a fire on the ground. I only wish I’d put the legs on the kettle. The moment the fire got hot, the ground below started smoking. Obviously a whole lot of oil had gotten dumped there, and it was reacting to the heat. I scooted and squirmed the legs, lying down, underneath the kettle, which was of course very hot, and that seemed to solve the problem.

I re-plotted our route in the driver’s seat of the RV and drank a well deserved beer. Suddenly, from the passenger front side of the MH, comes this ‘BONG!’ noise, like a dull hollow bell going off.

Alex discovered the joy of waving at passing trains. This is a busy track. We didn’t see another car the entire time we were out there, but there’s mile-long trains passing every four hours. Alex waved, the engineers waved back enthusiastically and blow their horns.

Next day we drove back to Toano Well, and turned east there. This road was in great shape, and I wondered if there’s a better road up there somewhere that the RV might be able to handle. Right now even without the rain puddles, we’d be stopped cold long before Toano Well. I was wondering if maybe there was a road out of Montello that came up over the mountains here. We pass through a fence, climb a bit more, and the road disappears at what on the map and according to the GPS is 80 Foot Well. There’s an actual pond here with tons of water and a handsome herd of cattle. Robin spots a road higher up, and we turn toward it, going across spongy grass, and sure enough the road appears again.

This road up here is much, much better than the road below. We’re riding along the crest and you can see for twenty miles, and there is NOTHING. I’m telling you there’s not a town, a structure, a radio tower. Once again, I’m torn between terror and heaven. It could just be me, but never in the Anza-Borrego or Joshua Tree have I had this anxiety I’m experiencing. Of course, it could be a compilation, the incredibly long and lonely drive getting here, the sheer sparseness of things. The fact that the Bounder’s passenger front tire is locked up and we’re at least two miles from the nearest paved road and the nearest town bigger than a postage stamp is close to fifty miles away.

We get to Jog’s Well. There’s two windmill towers with Aeromotors, and it’s all on the ground. This hasn’t been used in fifty years. We’d been going through patches of ten foot tall Juniper, and here it’s even bigger. I wish I’d done more research on the plant life. Our property should be roughly a half-mile further on.

We got to the property, and well, there it is. There’s a road that goes over the top of it, that’s the road we're on, and there’s a very little used road that’s washed out close to the end of our property, and then there’s a barely there road off the very little used road that drives up into our road, about halfway. It’s overgrown and would require some effort to clear. There are no trees, junipers or anything like that on the property. We found two digs, coyote holes, really. Someone was looking for something. I don’t know the name of the dominant plant in this part of the country. Someone just called it ‘sage’, and since this is part of the Great Basin, I’m wondering if it isn’t that ‘Purple Sage’ cowboys sing about. In any case, its this gray plant that covers our land and just about everything else we’ve gone through for the last twenty-one miles.

Acreage is relative. An acre of land in Southern California is huge, but forty acres feels down-right claustrophobic when it’s overlooking a hundred mile view to mountains still capped with snow in the northern distance.

My thought was, let’s walk the property line, as near as I can get it, and if possible, inventory what we’ve got. There’s all sorts of cactus, prickly pear varieties for the most part, some hedgehog. Let’s take pix and when we get home we’ll determine what variety of cactii We Own. There’s a swell of land close to the center, where the barely-there road goes, at least toward. What’s there? There’s all sorts of sign, piles of poop that I’ve got questions about. There’s deer, elk, antelope and maybe bear in the area, and some of them seem to spend a lot of time on our property.

Kids wouldn’t go for that. Kids would sit down right there and just start playing, dig in those coyote holes right off the main road. Robin, meanwhile, wants to roll, she wants to look around, cruise the roads and see what’s there.

We pile in and cruise. Another two miles up, maybe a gain of two hundred feet, you start getting real forest. In patches, sure, but there’s big junipers, Pinyon Pine and two different kinds of firs that look like something you could build a house under, or at least next to.

But within five miles we come up on top of a crest and, look, you can see fifty miles and there’s NOTHING. Fifty miles north and west is this sage stuff, north-east is climbing hills with Pinyon Pine, juniper and sage. I know there’s the Wine Cup Ranch headquarters, once owned by Jimmy Stewart, now owned by a polygamist cult worth thirty million dollars, only recently busted for forcing a sixteen year old girl to marry her seventy year old great uncle. There’s the Oregon Trail or the California Trail out there that would go to the headwaters of the Humboldt River, where tens of thousands of pioneers in the 19th Century traveled to the promised lands. The Donner Party passed through there. Knowing that doesn’t help me want to plunge forward.

This has taken us through into the evening, and I’m thinking we have to get back. Thunderheads are forming in the south and west. Robin agrees, and shortly we’re checking out the Toano cemetery that has been looted, the graves dug up, and abandoned homesteads from like the 1980’s. The walls inside one looked like it had just been painted, Navajo White.

We then drove over to Cobre, which is just on the other side of the track. The only thing actually left of Cobre is a huge structure that steam engines could fit into to be worked on and disassembled. That’s what I read on the ‘Net. What they don’t talk about is the extensive diggings and structures that sit behind that. Don’t ask me what we found, but there were three sets of rails down into a trench, with what must have been an overhead walkway, I assume to also work on engines and cars. We also find a pair of kid’s cowboy boots, and I mean expensive boots, abandoned on the road.

From Cobre we realize why the train engineers seem to spot Alex so quickly and honk. The Bounder stands out like a roadside billboard. We noticed there’s a lot of mounds around it and the stables, so we headed back.

Like I said, there’s ghost towns all along the railroad track, most nothing but a cleared spot on the ground, but all around us, the stables merely being the tallest structure among them, is hovels and storage facilities that don’t even appear on the map, that we hadn’t even seen until we got across the track and looked back. The Nevada Northern and the Southern Pacific both were built and maintained by Chinese Coolies. I’m wondering if we hadn’t set up in the middle of China Camp. The structures, made from road ties, are underground; mean horrible places. There’s trash heaps that have been systematically looted by treasure hunters, and the remains left behind are broken purple glass and rusty cans, so I don’t know. I remember, though, that when we were in Tombstone, a tour guide told us about how someone building an RV park in Old Tombstone started flattening out the ground, and realized they’d hit underground tunnels and hovels, that turned out to be long-abandoned Chinese opium dens. No one even knew they’d existed.

Robin and Alex dreamt up a game where they told the twins they’d found a treasure map showing where something was buried. The twins were given directions, a little assistance applying said directions, and were told to dig. Shortly they found all sorts of treasure, just about all the coins Robin could find in her pocket. They were ecstatic, and we finally had to drag them inside for dinner. They would’ve dug until it was too dark to see.

Robin and Alex sat down that night and calculated that, though we couldn’t get the RV back to the property, at least not by any road we’d seen so far, the Bronco hauling a fifteen foot travel trailer could. They developed an entire ‘casa’ design, where we’ll haul in three fifteen footers and position them up that barely there road, hidden from the main road against the back of our little hill. They’ll form a ‘U’, each trailer designated for a specific function, kitchen and dining room, bathroom and shower, bedrooms. They picture a utility trailer with generator, propane tank, water tank, and perhaps gray and black water tanks, if we can’t figure out a simple septic tank system there. They picture leaving the utility trailer there. My thought was to take the UT home with us, so the fuel doesn’t get old in the generator, and we could fill the water tank before we go in, as well as avoiding the specter of vandals. But that would require us either leaving the RV behind and just driving up there with the Bronco, something Robin is loathe to do, or one of us driving the Bronco with trailer and the other driving the RV.

The entire time we were there, the only other vehicles we saw were a mile long.

Next morning, it was time to head out. We decided that, even though Wells was closer, Wendover, touted as a booming casino town, would be more likely have someone who could fix the wheel. This was assuming we could even roll. Also, there was a KOA there, and not at Wells. Robin called them, analog roaming, and they told her about a repair shop that they said could fix anything. We called the shop, Robin describing our RV, a 1987 thirty-four foot Bounder with real troubles in the front passenger wheel.

If the tire locked up on the freeway, I didn’t want anyone inside the RV, so Robin followed me with the kids and dog in the Bronco.

To my utter amazement, the RV rolled like it had never had a problem. Without the Bronco on the trailer, I clipped along, the skies threatening more rain. At one point, Robin signaled me and pulled over. My stomach went into knots as I pulled over on the freeway. Would both vehicles fail us? Robin rolled down to me.

“Kellian can’t go anywhere else!” she proclaimed, and Kellian ran up the steps and into the Bounder’s bathroom.

After that, the Bounder started pulling hard to the right. Up to this point we’d been rolling through that purple sage, now we slipped into real-live honest t’God desert, Red to tan stone, jagged contours and sparse vegetation on the verge of a desperate thirsty death.

It seemed to take forever to get to Wendover, then I took the wrong off-ramp. I got back on the freeway, crossed the border into Utah, drove west on the business route almost back to where I’d gotten off first. The whole right side was shuddering now.

We pulled into the place KOA had recommended, the guy came out, eyes got big.

“Oh, I didn’t know you meant something like that,” the guy said. “Go up the road to Lonnie’s.”

I sighed, cranked the beast up and drove back the way we came.

We pulled into this hole-in-the-wall tumbled-down old gas station with a big empty lot next to it with graffiti on the hill behind it. I pulled the RV up, Robin pulled up behind me. I got out and found these two guys lounging around. I explained my dilemma. Both of them seemed mildly annoyed. I stood around waiting to see what they were going to do. The older one with a really foul mouth walked out and looked at the Bounder.

“Where ya’ been?” he asked. The Bronco was so coated with mud and dust, I could see where someone might ask.

“Cobre. Heard of it? It’s a little…”

“I know Cobre,” the man countered. “Ghost town out on the old Northern Nevada.” He looked over at the dust covered RV and Bronco, looked me up and down and bellowed, “You must be Desert Rats!”

The Shop, owned and run by Lonnie, in Wendover, Utah. West Wendover is the gambling town, Wendover is Utah. Lonnie. Don’t know his last name. The Shop, Auto and Light Diesel Repair, 755 East Wendover Boulevard, (435) 665-2822. Remember the number. Run this off and keep the number under your emergency numbers. If you find yourself having trouble, if you need to have any issue addressed pertaining to your vehicle, and you’re anywhere near Wendover, go to Lonnie. Or if you just want to stop by and give him money, say I sent you.

He and Matthew, whose from Idaho and was just visiting, played musical cars to clear a spot underneath the canopy of the old gas station and had me pull up the Bounder. In the course of the day, Lonnie, a hard core desert rat and ghost town explorer, told us about Spruce Mountain. I remembered the name since we’d stopped there to check the fuse for the windshield wiper, before we even got to Wells. Lonnie said there’s like five separate ghost towns up on Spruce Mountain, and the next time we came through, we’d have to check that out. (According to the ‘Net, there are in fact eleven separate communities that existed on Spruce Mountain, chasing veins of lead back and forth across the peak. There’s also something like ten pages of pictures, none of them like the one’s Lonnie’s got of a unique engine the size of the room you’re sitting in right now.)

“Go get something t’eat,” Lonnie told me.

“Is there a playground around here?” I asked.

“Behind the Visitor’s Center.” Lonnie grimaced. “Pathetic excuse for a playground, but its all we got.”

Naturally, dogs not allowed. Thompson, the dog, and I sat outside. After about an hour, we drove back. I didn’t expect much. Matthew had the caliper off.

“Caliper locked up,” Lonnie proclaimed. “It’s absolutely destroyed. Need to go get another one. The part’s in Wells. Know where that is? They’ll deliver tomorrow or you can go get it right now.”

“I’ll go get it right now,” I said.

“Here’s the old one,” Matthew put the baked caliper in a box. “Be careful. It’s still hot.”

I found out later that Matthew was, in fact, a former employee, who had come back just to visit that day.

Wells is sixty miles west of Wendover. My thought was that Robin and the herd would stay in the RV, and I would go get the part, but Robin and the kids piled in with me. The speed limit is 75 miles an hour. I did my best to keep to that, but its an old Bronco working on that magical 300k, geared extensively for off-roading, not for the freeway. We got passed by something red and exotic, with a 60s something guy all alone behind the wheel, and I couldn’t help but think; “YES.”

The parts store in Wells is also a hardware store. That makes perfectly good sense, if you think about it, but it struck me at the time as bizarre.

“Mike,” (I was told to ask for ‘Mike’), “Lonnie sent me.”

Mike and everybody else had to hear the story about our travails and disastrous predicament. Mike brought out the new caliper, and boy was I glad I’d brought the old one, because he had the driver’s side caliper, not the right. They got the right one, and I was headed out.

“Well, next time you’re in Wells, hopefully you can just stop by and pick up an air freshener,” Mike said.

“Why?” I asked. “Do I smell?”

The two other counter people had to drag themselves off the floor.

“You walked right into that one, Mike!”

“What - what I meant was, next time you’re here, hopefully you won’t need anything more serious than an air freshener, or, you know, something like that.”

Back at Lonnie’s, Matthew threw the new caliper on and reassembled.

“Why would a caliper lock up like that?” I asked Lonnie.

Lonnie hemmed and hawed, and then finally said, “I honestly don’t know, t’tell the truth.”

Gotta love it. A mechanic who admits he doesn’t know.

The tire was on. We took it out for a test drive.

The caliper still locked up. Lonnie and Matthew were grim. Robin was on a roller coaster. The kids wanted to go back to the playground.


The dilemma was; if it wasn’t the caliper, what was it? If it was the master cylinder, all the tires would be locking up. If it were the regulator, either the back or the front would be locking up. But it’s only the front right.

“All we can do is work up the line,” Lonnie proclaimed after some time. “This could take a while. And we close at five. Start again tomorrow.”

“Would it be all right if we stay in the RV here, overnight?” I ask.

“Sure, no problem.” Lonnie says. “Where else would y’go?”

They pulled off the line that’s up from the caliper, try to blow air through it. Nothing went through.

“That’s crazy, there’s nothing but rubber tubing and fittings,” Matthew says. They run down to the local parts store, the one that didn’t have a caliper. They also don’t have the right hose part, but they do have a line with the right fittings, its just a little short. Lonnie drags the hard line out a bit and it fits. Then he pulls off the metal bracket to the old line to pin the new. That’s when he brings the old line to me.

“Look at this. Years ago, water got between the metal and the line. The metal rusted, and over the years, the rust swelled and crushed the rubber hose. I’ve never seen anything like that before, ever.”

We threw the parts on, bled the brakes, tested it. It was perfect, the best stopping I’ve ever enjoyed.

“We didn’t turn the rotor, so the pads won’t last that long, and you gotta get the right hose piece, so that metal line isn’t stretched out. And you better check the other side. But you’re gonna get home all right. Now, the bill.

“How many hours you got on this, Matthew?”

We’d rolled in at nine or ten, and it was five now. A big sign inside the shop clearly said: “Mechanics an hour: $50. Motor Homes: $75” I figured, with an hour off for lunch, that was about six hours, four hundred dollars labor, at least.

Matthew frowned and bobbed his head.

“Three hours.”

Lonnie stared at Matthew for awhile. I’m confused, what clock had Matthew been on?

“Think that’s fair to you, Matthew?”

Matthew grimaced, shrugged and answered quietly.

“I think its fair.”

Lonnie stared a little more, shrugged. When he threw the bill together, it came to $335.75.

Check the price of a caliper for a GMC P-30 frame. Total parts came to $81.75, shop supplies, $10.00.

Like I said, if you ever find yourself in Wendever, look for The Shop, and look up Lonnie. Throw money at him for me, just for being a good desert rat taking care of his own.

We’d lost a day. We should have been either in Tonopah or pretty close at five in the afternoon. To get back on schedule and get to the Arizona property on time, we had to go back the way we came. The only difference was right there at the beginning, Alternate 93 to 93, then south to 15 and back to Vegas, and a whole new set of adventures.

With three hours left of light, the Bronco back on the trailer, we could make the Ely KOA.

It was Wednesday, I think, and several times I put the Bounder right down the median line, because you could see twenty miles ahead on those long flat straight-aways and see there wasn’t another car. The only cars we saw were passing us. We made Ely just as the sun was setting. I turned on the lights. The headlights were on, but the instrument panel lights never showed. When we pulled into the KOA, I checked the fuse and replaced it. They still aren’t working.

Next day was the forced march. We retraced our steps, taking a good long break at the Pahranagat National Wildlife refuge. From there, it was full speed ahead. The wind on I-15 scared the hell out of me, and 18-wheelers passed me like I’m parked. Still, we made good time. We get into Las Vegas, and the traffic is bumper to bumper. After so many days of not seeing another human being, occasionally driving for hours without seeing another vehicle, this is a shock.

Everything past Las Vegas feels compressed. Next goal is Henderson on 93/95, and, Bam, there it is. Turning onto 95, cruising for Searchlight, and it’s suddenly there, its hills riddled with the remains of long ago mines. Onto 163 and turning toward Laughlin.

The drop into town is stupendous. The speed limit is anywhere from 45 to 65 miles an hour. With a thirty-four foot motor home and a trailer with a full-sized Bronco on it, I rarely passed 40. We cruised into town, across Davis Dam, admired the campsite right there, with the water such an incredible shade of blue, and started back up the other side, where I got down to thirty miles an hour, the transmission fluid getting up to 300 degrees. I had changed the transmission oil and filter for this trip. I wonder if I’m going to have to do this every time.

And then, there we were in Kingman, searching for the KOA, which is in a residential area. There was still some sunlight. The directions given on the KOA map were wrong. Robin was pissed with me.

I checked on the GPS and, as the Crow Flies, we were maybe forty miles away from our twenty acres up Box Canyon, sixty by road. This KOA had a nice pool, so Robin and the kids went swimming while Thompson and I spent some quality time together.

Bright and early the next day we hit the store, fueled the RV up at 186.9 and headed out. North on 40/93, and took the 93 south off-ramp. We stopped in Wikieup and put forty bucks of fuel in the Bronco. Next came the GPS readings I had made for the entrance to the road we were looking for. They were close enough that we caught it on the first pass, which was a good thing, since the next chance to turn around was another ten miles at Northing, Arizona, which doesn’t even appear on the map.

The road was dirt, but wide enough for two cars. It had recently been graded and looked like it was well maintained.

Next time we’ll unload the Bronco before we try to push through. The road stayed good, but there are some climbs and drops that I could’ve lived without having the weight of the Bronco behind us. I must learn to study the map more thoroughly, because, my impression was, we’d climb to a pass, then drop into a valley. Nothing could be further from the truth. We climbed and climbed and climbed a little more, running a crest, then dropped a bit into a gorgeous valley that still leaves the north dropping away from us, Box Canyon below us, giving us a hell of a view.

Robins started watching the UTM coordinates I had plugged into the GPS, for the northwest corner of our property. In the case of the Arizona property, it’s a part of something called Sandy River Rancheros. There are three ‘Sections’ marked Sandy River Rancheros, we’re in Section 25, right along the eastern edge, before entering BLM land. That clearly sets our East boundaries, at least within that fourteen feet I mentioned. The plots also are given specific widths, although not lengths. We’re plot 168 and 169. 168 is 661.30 and 169 is 661.53. Sounds like it was once maybe surveyed, but perhaps not certified. These tenths and one hundredths of a foot exceed my abilities anyway, so I aimed for 661 from the middle of the red line that marks Section 25 on the 7.5 topo map.

We reached the magical numbers, the actual spot off to our north, and looking south, all I can think is, we’ve bought the sheer side of a mountain.

The most eastern side is certainly sheer, climbing to a flat butte worthy of any B western John Wayne ever starred in. Down in front of us, south and next to the road, is a cattle corral, once again looking like something from the 19th century, except for the ramp, which looks relatively new. The southern side is a steep climb up the side of a cactus-covered hill. There is no road to plot 169.

The guy who sold us the property didn’t say anything about a corral, so choked with paddle cactus that’s there is no way cattle have been kept in it for the last twenty, fifty years.

Across the way, north on what may be our property, is a campsite. Big fire ring. Only thing is, it hasn’t been used since the last time they graded. There’s a berm I have to get over.

I try to maneuver into it, but we need to unload the Bronco, and I could even afford to get out the shovel and dig a little of the berm out. I settle for throwing a large number of rocks off the path. Robin is a champ, man-handling ramps into place and guiding me down as I get the Bronco off the trailer. I mean, we’re blocking this road that looks like a major thoroughfare. Then she drives the Bronco and the kids our of harms way as I back the Bounder and the trailer over the berm and into the camp spot. This Bounder is suspiciously enthusiastic about such things. I plant its legs, level us out. We set up camp.

My thought is that, first, we want to determine if we’re on our property. We’ve set up nearly underneath the power lines, which, to my utter relief, are just telephone poles. If you look at the map, you’d think they were those steel high-tension wire towers, which definitely would have ruined the view to the north.

If we’re east of the corral, then we’ve got nothing but slope. Thus is the risk of buying property, sight unseen.

Standing at roughly where I figure the northwest corner is, I call up the southwest coordinate, the long side of the twenty acres. It says I’m roughly a quarter mile away, which is right.

I had written a big page-long explanation about how I located those coordinates using TOPO! And the Section Map, how I made mistakes and how I corrected them. Somehow that didn’t get saved. I’m wondering if it’s the Cosmic Editor using his red pencil. I won’t attempt to recreate it, but instead….

I walked that quarter mile, leaving Robin and the kids behind. North was much further right than I had first imagined, placing a whole lot of a little valley within our property line. Shortly before I reached the southwest corner, I found a case of lead for a mechanical pencil. It wasn’t especially old, so I’m thinking somebody was doing the same thing I was. It’s too much of a coincidence that it should be right in my path. To the east, past a swell of that mountain, is a little valley hidden from the road that’s inside our property, full of cactus, mesquite, and the symbol of Arizona, the Saguaro, Carnegia Gigantia. The armed cactus with more than fourteen ribs. I and the family are the proud owners of about ten of them, from little baby to aged and grizzled veteran. Though there is no road, I can see a little cabin or trailer tucked up in here with a hell of a view to the north and west.

Looking back toward the RV, I calculated that about three quarters of that corral is on our property.

Later, after returning to Robin to discuss what I had found, I went to find the northeast corner. This required me to climb the sheer wall of the hill with the little lava rock butte at the top. I found that there was a very old unused road up there, not too far above the present road. When I reached the spot I calculated was the northeast corner, I stacked a pile of stones to mark the spot. Looking back from there to where the RV was, I suddenly saw something you could not see from below. It was a cut into this sheer side, a platform of sorts. I really didn’t inspect it as much as I should have, but it was at least fifty feet across and twenty feet wide. I could see no road to it from the west, but the old road from the east runs right into it. The platform is covered with weeds and mature cactus, so it hasn’t been used for a long time, if ever. I don’t think I’d try to get to it from the road that exists, though. I think I’d try to grade a much shorter road to it from the side of the corral. There very well may have been a road there, I just didn’t get a chance to really look. The view from this platform is right up Box Canyon, due north, and west, looking down the road we’d come in on, and the valley we’d dropped into. This platform should be just within our property line.

I never got to the southeast corner, which I should have when I was back in there. That would’ve told me how much of that little gulch is ours.

We spent the rest of the day cruising around that well-maintained road checking out the wild horse and burro prints all over the place, and noting that there was once very extensive facilities for cattle, much more than the few cattle we saw could ever justify. Here’s another version of the ghost town, human effort in this rugged country to make wealth, to struggle and create. There were several places we came across that had to have been either a major gathering spot, or major work place, all of them lost to time.

In Cobre, Nevada, at night, we had been obliged to turn on the central heat. Here, the heat is hovering at a hundred Fahrenheit. We are true desert rats, we sneer at the extensive air conditioning system available to us in the RV, wet our desert cami boonie hats, and stay in the shade.

The sun set, and Box Canyon looked like something out of a travel brochure.

We sat down and had ourselves a fire, and that’s when I noticed rocks on the ground that someone had shaped into a ‘V’ just east of the fire ring. I’m wondering if that was someone’s calculation for the northwest corner, which concurred right closely to my own.

Which meant that the trailer and the rear of the RV weren’t on our property, but the front two thirds and the Bronco were.

There’s a spring in the wash south of us called Kaiser Spring. Look it up on the ‘Net. It’s a warm spring, not so much a hot spring, that the fans of hot springs across the southwest have actually built a concrete pool that the hot water drains into, that you can sit and soak in. Its BLM, so its nobody’s and everybody’s. The sites you see on the ‘Net are pretty impressive, definitely worth looking into. There’s even an old gold mine not too far away, the Touch Hole Mine. From our property its three quarters of a mile, less as the crow flies, but I calculated having to do some switchbacks and the like. First thing the next morning I walked across our property, up through a pass to the south and started kicking around trying to find a good path down to the wash. I came to a sheer drop that guaranteed we weren’t going to get to the spring from there. Looking down, though, I could see an extensive and very old cattle corral. There were even cows there. And there was a road to it. The road doesn’t appear on the map, but the corral does.

Everybody was excited about this. We were going to a warm spring! Robin packed the cooler and loaded my backpack with the kids swimming outfits and towels. We all loaded into the Bronco and headed out.

The only road I could see on the map that went near this spot was marked a ‘jeep trail. It’s a pole road for those power lines that veer off the nicely maintained road, that must be for nothing else than servicing the gas line that goes to Bagdad. Right at the turnoff there is a flat spot that looks like it once had a structure or even a travel trailer on it, now reduced to rubble. I would’ve liked to have checked that out, but we were, after all, on a mission. There’s an extensive cattle corral not too far up this road that also rates some investigation. We traveled along this road, which is in surprisingly good shape, until we came to a wash that had tire tracks down it.

This is a serious sandy wash, definitely testing the four-wheel drive. On two occasions, the crew spotted entire cow skeletons bleaching out in the sun. We made a note to grab a cow skull on the way out.

We got to the corral, I pulled up under a canopy of honey mesquite, Alex flapped down the back to unload the dog, and lo and behold, what’s taking deliberate steps towards us but this really big bull. We load back up and turn around, get back in the wash.

Robin is not deterred. She orders me to turn left and keep going down the wash. We can see the bull through the mesquite watching us as we drive by. In fact, the road peters completely out well within sight of the critter. Robin orders us to pile out. We start our trek. According to the GPS, we are less than a quarter mile from the spring.

The day is definitely going to be hot. I’m hauling the cooler full of sodas and snacks, and Nick, the three year old twin, wants me to carry him. He’s whining and carrying on most of the way. There are some challenging spots where Robin actually tripped. Finally, we come to this little crevice, and there’s a small pool of water covered with wasps. To continue on, we have to step over the wasps.

“Why don’t you guys stay here, and I’ll reconnoiter, see how bad this gets,” I say. All the directions I’ve seen to get to Kaiser Spring have started from the highway, so we’re coming in the back way. I haven’t mentioned this to Robin.

I jumped over the wasps. Past that, there’s a lot of water, sheer sides covered with barrel cactus and saguaro. I don’t recognize the dominant plant in the water, but it goes from bush to tree.

Now I’m bushwhacking through the water, the brush thick, the GPS finally contending that the spring is to my right, which is up a sheer side of mountain.

I think of the pictures I’d seen on the ‘Net of the spring and tub, and this ain’t it. The sheer mountainsides are right, but trees never appear in it, nor in the text.

I can hear Alex calling for me. I’ve probably been away for fifteen minutes. I hurry back. I’m thinking everyone, especially Robin, is going to be disappointed.

“Let’s go see, anyway,” Robin suggests.

We go a short way, where, shaded by those trees, there’s a row of sandy beaches with big rocks and water coming out of holes in a boulder. It really is a pitiful little stretch of water, with cow patties all over the place.

The kids, and surprisingly, Robin, are ecstatic. We could’ve spent the rest of the vacation there. Now that I think about it, it was kind of like Oriflamme Canyon in the Anza Borrego. Private land up until recently, the state’s agents have purchased it, and now that it’s public land, we won’t be able to camp there any more. Another reason to start searching for Kaiser Springs.

The kids got into their swimming outfits and are running around in the water having a wonderful time. Everybody set about building dams in the stones. Thompson showed us how to party! He ran through the water, bounced around for awhile, then threw himself over and landed in the water, legs kicking wildly in the air as he twisted crazily, then got up and ran at break-neck speed up and down our little stretch of water.

I’m sitting there enjoying myself, watching everybody have a good time, admiring the sheer walls of stone and an absolute cornucopia of cacti and vegetation you just don’t see in our corner of desert, when I got to thinking about all these cow patties. Where do you suppose all the cows are? The more I thought about it, the more I got to thinking how we’re stuck in this thin little gorge, this pass up behind us that we walked through with the wasps. What if that bull and his lady friends decided they wanted to be where we are, the same place they were yesterday and who knows how many days and months before that? How would we surrender our location gracefully, without us having to pass through their ranks to get back to the Bronco?

I note several boulders that I could chuck the kids up on, you know, just in case, but I don’t say anything.

When I have the chance to check on the ‘Net again, and compare notes, I realize, the people talking about Kaiser Springs, aren’t talking about Kaiser Springs. In fact, they’re calling Warm Springs, which is maybe five miles down this gorge, which is Kaiser Spring Canyon, Kaiser Springs. They mention a gold mine further along, and sure enough, Burro Mine is not too far past Warm Springs. They’ve got that named wrong, too, they call it Touch Hole Mine. Lesson learned: people on the Internet are just people talking. They don’t necessarily know what they’re talking about. We’ll hit Warm Springs next time we go, but we had such a good time at Kaiser Springs, we might go back to that as well.

We finally decide we better head out, we’d been there nearly two hours. The kids dry off and get in their clothes, and we walk back to the Bronco. On the way out, we had intended to stop at those cow skeletons and score a skull for Alex. very time we came toward one, though, a bull would step out of the mesquite and glare at us.

We made it back to the Bounder. Something we’ve got to learn about the twins, every once in a while, you basically have to let them sit down and play in the sand. At three, they like to travel, but once there, they want to touch it, smell, lay on it, ‘grok it in fullness’. Kellian decides my beer bottles would make perfect butterfly houses and hangs them in the creosote.

Ultimately we cruised down to the highway again, then checked out some of the offshoots on what I’ll call Box Canyon Road, although it doesn’t seem to have any kind of a designation.

We fool around to the north. There’s an extensive homestead there that also must have been cattle related. We start trying to go up Box Canyon itself. That fizzles out pretty quickly, but we did find a spring right in the wash. It was a curious facility, with odd vent pipes and the water tank itself made from a giant tractor tire. I’m wondering if there’s a road that enters closer from the top of Box Canyon.

Back at base, we settled in for the night. I had intended to stay up all night and enjoy the stars and wife, but between exhaustion and underestimating the potency of Wicked Pete’s Summer Ale, bought in Kingman by the wife as a treat for me, I crashed way too early.

Next morning, its time to leave again. It’s the familiar routine with only a few minor alterations to accommodate the Bounder. Put everything away, wet down the fire kettle and make sure the embers are dead. While that’s cooling off, police up the area, collect any toys, put as much away as you can. When you fire up the engine, let it run for a while, lift the legs, secure all loose items inside. Empty the kettle, this time in the fire ring that’s already there. At home it would be into a five gallon bucket for transportation home.

When we started out, Robin drove the Bronco behind me, and it proved uneventful to the road. Now all we had to do was load the Bronco, but Robin suggested that she drive it behind us for a while. We had hardly burned any of the fuel off, and Robin had become sensitive to my concern about weight, especially on the trailer, so I said ‘yeah’. I think she was glad to be away from the kids for awhile too, drive a little, think without the background noise of the world as it is pressing in. The kids were surprisingly quiet, once I convinced them that we were not leaving Mom behind.

We turned south on to 93, and without anything on the trailer, that RV booked. Miscalculation on a couple of climbs, not shifting down soon enough, and some crosswinds, slowed me down on some climbs, but really we made great time. At the turnoff for 71, that allows you to bypass Wickenburg, there’s a big old empty place for us to load the Bronco. Robin pointed out that there was still an awful lot of gas in the Bronco, and that there was at least one spot ahead with the dreaded “Pass” word in its name. So we ran for another hundred miles. For once the word ‘Pass’ has no altitude meaning. We reach some little town with a clear spot, and there we loaded the Bronco.

Nick had started feeling sick, and spent an awful lot of time in robin’s lap.

This was another forced march, traveling from the Arizona land to home in one day, July 3rd. It felt downright compressed. Down to I-10, west to Quartzite, 93 south to Yuma, I-8 west to home.

If you were the load of people in the north-bound early-model Bounder, July 3rd , before noon, waving gleefully at me as you passed, I’m sorry, you caught me off-guard. Consider yourself waved back at.

We would’ve stopped in Yuma for lunch, but we just didn’t see anything that looked good in sight of the road. We hit Gordons Well rest stop, a pitiful excuse for a rest area, and Robin chopped up some ham and cheese and came up with Ritz crackers, and everyone ate to their heart’s content. Meanwhile a shirtless kid with a jacked up, beefed up truck and biceps to match is going around begging tools. I happened to have a wrench, and within ten minutes he had the truck fixed. He called us ‘Sent by God’. He didn’t look like a bible thumper. A true fellow desert rat? You must know how to spot your own.

The next challenge was climbing Devil’s Canyon. That’s from roughly five hundred feet to 3500 feet in about three miles. Make a note, never drive a 34 foot Bounder hauling a 6000lbs Bronco on a flatbed trailer up Devil’s Canyon on the hottest time of the day in July. We got up to 310 degrees. Maybe you can tell me what that means. Normally the transmission runs so cold that, for the longest time, I wondered if the gauge worked. We know Ocotillo intimately. We could’ve pulled off there and waited a couple of hours. We were making excellent time. But we didn’t, hopefully nothing is worse for the wear.

Our final stop before getting home was Buckman Springs Rest Area, the only place I know, so far, with a public tank dump.

Someone with no class had been there before us, and had done an awful job of dumping, and then hadn’t washed the solid filth down. I gag thinking about it.

Finally, though, we got home. We’d left Friday June 25th and had traveled 1956 miles in nine days, still in time to participate in the Crest Fourth of July Parade with Cub Scout Pack 332.

I’m going to get in that RV and wash everything with chlorine before the next major trip. I’m going to shampoo the rug with an alergenic, and I’m going to vacuum every which way the linen we’ve got in there, maybe figure out some way to get the dust out of the drapes. Everyone got good and sick after we got home, and that seems to happen every time we go Rving.

I still have to replace the lines on the front brakes, turn the rotors, replace the pads. I still have to check the rear brakes to see if there’s any issues there. Other possible future shocks to the budget: Shock absorbers, front wheel controllers, an odd sound coming from the engine that could be nothing, could be the alternator, could be the water pump. How do you get the water pump out? Aren’t you obliged to remove the radiator, or can I just, for instance, move it out a bit?

What’s the trick to getting a GMC rotor off the front tires? I know they don’t just come off like on a Ford or Chrysler.

Now, though, I find myself lazily dreaming of the land, especially the Arizona land. We need to get back and really walk the land we own, inventory what’s there.

But wait, Father’s day, the wife got past my security and logged onto E-Bay and bought 20 acres east of Woodruff Arizona.

Anybody know anything about the area? Any hot springs nearby?