On Sunday, January 12, 2020, we moved our RV from 88 Shades in Quartzsite to Boomerville. For those of you who have never stayed in Boomerville, it is difficult to describe. Boomerville is not a location, but a state of mind. Every January, folks from our RV club, the Escapee Boomers, gather in the desert near Quartzsite for a couple weeks of desert fun. For the past two years, the Boomers have circled up near mile marker 3 off Plomosa Road. Before that, Boomerville was located in Scadden Wash. While the new location offers plenty of room for the Boomers to spread out, the old spot was closer to the mountains and one of our favorite hikes. On Monday, January 13, 2020, we decided to pay Old Boomerville a visit and hike that favorite hike to the Stone Cabin.
We like to start our hikes with a trailhead selfie, but with no real trail, just open desert, we decided to let Dusty mark the start of our hike.
We set off from Scadden Wash, crossed Mitchell Mine Road, and walked out into the desert and up Smith Wash, roughly paralleling BLM Road 190 as it runs east into the western edge of the Plomosa Mountains. The hike took us past the gravesite of Elizabth M. Mullen who died in 1996. We first saw this grave in 2016. Time and the elements have almost covered it.
We continued hiking up large alluvial plains which lead straight up into the mountains.
We noticed what looked like a geoglyph carved in the desert surface. Could this be a bird or spider like those on the Nazca Desert in Peru? Unfortunately, we didn't discover ancient alien art, but tire tracks from some ATVer doing wheelies.
Just behind this lumpy hump was the valley which we would follow up to the stone cabin.
Mining - especially for gold and silver - has been prevalent in this region for centuries. It is still possible to stake a claim to an area of ground, and we saw several claim stakes such as those shown in the photo below.
One notable historic site we passed is known as the "Spanish Wall," which is said to have been a retaining wall build of stone on one side of an old Spanish gold mine. In recent years, the wall was vandalized, leaving only the left portion in the photo below intact:
While we didn't follow the exact path from our two previous hikes, we did find our way to the stone cabin.
Our return hike was all downhill. Off in the distance is the greater Quartzsite area.
After finishing our hike, we returned to New Boomerville just in time for Happy Hour. Time to let the good times roll.
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