Living at Black Canyon

After six months of living in a motor home, this is the first time that we have stayed in a national park campground.  We purposefully bought a shorter motor home because we wanted to stay in state and national parks.  But we are finding that national parks are booked up months in advance during the times we wanted to visit.  Even with a smaller motor home there aren't too many spots that we will fit into, and those will be booked up for sure.  So this was the first time that we knew our schedule enough in advance that we could reserve a site in a lesser-known national park.  As the picture shows, we have our own private nook in Loop B-site #2.

What you can't see from that picture is that our campsite was next to the road.  It took five leveling pads to get the motor home level on the passenger side.  Also, this site was obviously designed before RVs had slide outs.  We have two slide outs on each side, but we could only open the two on the passenger side.  The driver's side slide outs would have been out in the road!

The above picture also shows a new addition to our arsenal of technical devices.  The silver tube in the back steps is holding up a cell phone booster.  It boosts a weak signal into a usable signal, and it has been great to have in the last three sites in the mountains!  Mark ordered and installed it, and Denisa thinks it is great to travel with a computer guru.

Denisa also thinks it is great to travel with a camp fire guru.  

We used our pie iron again, and remembered to take pictures this time.  We had ham and cheese camp-fire toasted sandwiches one evening in the national park.

For dessert, we had cream cheese and blueberry pies.  We had to cut them open to show how delicious they were.  Not bad for a couple of slices of bread with pie filling between.  Adding cream cheese to the inside, and sprinkling the outside with cinnamon sugar made them even better.

The drive into the national park includes a very steep approach road.  Denisa was announcing the elevation changes that were displayed on our GPS so Mark would know how fast we were climbing (as if he couldn't tell from his view out the windshield).  We climbed from around 6500 feet at the highway, to 8200 feet at our campground.  

We are glad to report that our diesel engine has performed great in our time in the mountains.  It gets us up these mountain roads, and more importantly, the diesel's engine brake helps get us safely back down those mountain grades.  When we were trying to decide between a gas or diesel motor home, that engine brake helped make the decision to go diesel.  At the time, diesel was costing a dollar more than gas per gallon, so it was a hard financial decision to make.  Just recently, we have seen the price of diesel below that of gas.  Good news for our decision to go with diesel!

This steep route to the national park also has some interesting wildlife in the road.  We noticed that cows are not as coordinated on steep slopes as the mountain goats we have seen.

We had other wildlife in our camp area.  We saw several doe with their fawns during our stay.  It's hard to tell with the shadows, but there is a doe and fawn on the right, and another fawn in the sunlight on the left.

There is probably some joke about, "Why did the fawn cross the road?" but we're not sure what the punch line would be.

The other wildlife in the campground was not as cute.  When we attended the 9 p.m. ranger program (another perk to staying in the campground) they mentioned a "problem bear" that was ransacking sites that left any food outside.  Sure enough, our next door neighbors reported seeing a 600 pound bear at 10:30 p.m. in their site on our last night in the park.  Mark was so sad to miss it; Denisa was so glad that it was time to move to another campground!