When we arrived at Rio Bend Resort, Denisa was reading the week's activities at the park. She was intrigued by the "Border Tour" scheduled for the next morning. After a couple phone calls, we were signed up to go to the local border patrol office the next day for their five-hour tour.
It started with some classroom time with an explanation of their mission, and then a tour of their facilities. They have 11 processing rooms where they hold illegal immigrants for their return back to Mexico. A small percentage of these people will be from other countries, and their return is more difficult. Then we got information about the nonlethal and lethal tools they use in their job. Here Mark is getting some hands-on experience with the fire-arms on the lethal end of the table.
After an hour inside, we headed out into the desert with our officers. Here they could give us first-hand experience in the tracking they do in the sand every day. Their day would often start with dragging the sandy roads that would have to be crossed by people coming over the border. This tool is made from old tires, and is pulled behind their pickups to give a nice smooth surface that would show fresh foot prints.
Then they gave us tracking lessons, and tricks that illegals often use to try to fool them. One option is to break off a creosote branch to brush out their tracks. Another is walking backwards, or taking off their shoes. In the years they have worked at the border, they have seen it all.
Who knew that border patrol officers could be so entertaining? Our guides were lots of fun, telling us experiences from their jobs along the borders around the country.
They drove us all the way to the border, to see the fence right at the bottom of Signal Hill. We have been admiring this mountain from our RV park, not knowing that it was actually in Mexico. Mark is standing beside the fence here. It's easy enough for a walker to cross, but its real purpose is to stop vehicular traffic trying to transport many illegals at once. We saw film of pickups loaded with twenty or more people, and fences like this have helped to snuff that form of human smuggling.
With twenty people on-board, however, it was easy for all those people together to pick up one heavy sections. Then the pickup could drive through the opening in the barricade. So the sections had to be chained together to keep that from happening.
They've also added big cement pillars in front of this type of fence, because smugglers driving large numbers of people over the border can be very persistent.
Vehicles crossing the border illegally are also often carrying narcotics. The border patrol's mission includes stopping illegal drugs from entering the country. They are seeing that smugglers are using illegal immigrants to transport drugs. Individuals often pay a high price for the smuggler's help in getting across the border, as well as transportation within the United States. When the price goes up in the middle, the illegal immigrant's only option to pay the bill might be to agree to carry narcotics to deliver to their transportation source. Some times that might be a large back-pack of illegal drugs.
Our border patrol friends showed us that the fence comes in different forms. Here it changes from a vehicular fence, to a taller fence to make it harder for humans as well. They also pointed out that these are fences--different than the wall that we are hearing about in the news.
The border patrol drove us to the town of Calexico, California, which sits right on the border. This fence separates it from the one million people that live in Mexicali, Mexico. In fact, we could look through the fence to see the busy street that runs parallel with our city street on the U.S. side.
There are border patrol pickups and agents on bicycles tirelessly patrolling the U.S. side of that fence. Things happen faster within the city, and the crossings are more frequent than those in the desert. One of the problems is there is a line of houses right across the street, where illegals can find refuge in a hurry.
Again, the border patrol is trying to stop the illegal drugs that are crossing that fence as much as the illegal immigrants. They have seen an increase in the practice of throwing bags of drugs over that fence into the backyards of houses right on the border. With unlimited monetary resources, it is easy for the drug cartel to convince the residents of the low-income housing on the border to help them with this plan.
The drug cartel has been known to spend massive amounts of money to fund new schemes for their drug trafficking. Each year, the border patrol finds tunnels built to transport people and drugs across the border underground. One such discovery was found with a tunnel that ended inside this new house, built by cartel money a couple years ago.
Patroling the border is often a frustrating task. This brand new outlet mall was approved by the city of Calexico, with a back door just a few feet from the border fence. Now an illegal has a whole new series of places to hide as soon as they cross the border.
The other frustrating aspect to us is that when an illegal immigrant is caught, there doesn't seem to be a real penalty. They are finger-printed and processed, then transported back to Mexico. It's not unusual to catch the same person two days in a row, as there isn't a real penalty for getting caught. Because the border patrol can't be everywhere, there is always a good chance that the illegal alien will certainly be successful eventually.
Since we have lived along the Mexico border for several months, this was a great tour for us. We have seen many of the blimp-like surveillance balloons floating high above the ground. We found out these 55-foot balloons have military grade cameras capable of reading a license plate almost a mile away. Not long ago, we saw a blimp on the ground.
We learned a lot on our day with our favorite border patrolmen. We appreciate their mission and their jobs more, and we wish them safe and productive patrols!
After spending almost three weeks in Arizona, we were finally ready to cross the state line into California. But there is a little more preparation than usual for this state border crossing. Because the price of fuel is higher over that border, we filled our big 100 gallon diesel tank on the Arizona side. We like being able to fill up using the fast diesel pumps, but we don't like the long lines behind all those trucks.
Just a few miles into our journey this day, we crossed into a new state for the motor home. After two years of taking pictures of state border signs, Denisa should be more practiced at this. But today she only got the picture of "Welcome to Calif." She decided she likes that new abbreviation, and it also takes less key strokes to type.
We had an interesting breakfast this morning. Because we had read that we would have to pass through an agricultural inspection upon entering Calif, we have been eating all of our produce with reckless abandon. For breakfast we ate the final grapefruits and the last orange. After choking down five grapefruit this morning, we were a little disappointed when they just waved us through the checkpoint without inspecting our cargo! What?!? We would never want to bring anything in that would harm a state's agriculture, so at least we have a clear conscience to go with our empty refrigerator.
We have also seen a difference in the roads in our new state. We have never seen a highway sign that instructs drivers - "Follow signs and disregard your GPS." Sure enough, our GPS gave us some crazy advice through this section of Interstate 8. But we didn't fall for it--we just followed the signs.
Here's another interesting Calif road sign. They think it's important to let you know that you no longer should drive 40 mph, but they don't have a sign to tell you what the new speed limit is.
We decided to spend our first four Calif days in a resort about an hour down the road, outside the town of El Centro. Rio Bend RV and Golf Resort is built around a very nice 9-hole golf course.
They are a Passport America park, but they don't take that discount during the popular winter months. Instead, they gave us an even better rate, and we wish we could have stayed longer. But we have reservations at our next stop, so we are tied to a schedule. This was just supposed to be a restful stop, since we didn't think there was much to do in this area. So we thought we would have four days of resting up and taking advantage of all the resort amenities. For example, Denisa enjoyed the zumba class at the fitness center. We also got to make use of our pickle ball paddles, as they had four courts near the club house.
We also learned how to play bocce ball. We didn't know any of the rules, but there was an instruction sheet that explained everything to us. The rules aren't too complicated, but we won't explain all of them here. Let's just say that it's not good news that Denisa is throwing a red ball, and all the green balls are closer to the white ball. It looks like Mark has won again.
The resort is in the middle of more agricultural land, and with all our spare time we can watch the broccoli harvest as it happens right across the road from us. We're not sure what was wrong with the heads that were left at the edge of the field, but they must not have passed the buyer's inspection.
We found that over half of the seasonal residents at Rio Bend Resort are from Canada. Then we also found out that Canadians aren't the only ones that go south for the winter. Sheep herds are trucked from the great white north to this area in the fall and winter to clean up the green plants left over from vegetable harvest.
The Rio Bend Resort is beautiful, with lovely flower beds, and flowering bushes between each RV site. It's one of the best landscaped parks we've stayed in during our travels.
To make our experience even better, there is a cafe on site, and we had live music every evening. That means dancing under the portico! The first evening we were greeted with cold temperatures and 40 mph winds, but we wore our coats and danced anyway. That's very unusual weather here, but we heard from several residents that this had been an unusually cold and windy winter in southern Calif.
We enjoyed the nearby town of El Centro, with shopping and restaurants. As we rolled through town, we realized that we're now below sea level. It's interesting that the town's water tank has sea level marked on the side.
But our favorite part of our new location was its vicinity to the Navy Base. It provides entertainment even when stopped at a red light.
That's because the famous Blue Angel pilots spend January through March stationed at this base, practicing their stunts for their busy spring and summer air shows across the country.
We couldn't go onto the military base, but there is a Blue Angel plane on display at the entrance.
We thought it was fun to park near the landing strips, watching planes of all sizes touch down on the runway and then return to the air for another circle. We later found out that the new pilots fly the white jets. So when you see this airplane, give lots of room to the newbie at the wheel.
Some jets were so loud and so fast that it was hard to track them in the sky. But it was great fun watching them lower their landing gears and come in close for a picture.
We often got fly-overs at the campground, and we could see the jets through our motor home windshield. One of our neighbors told us that instead of roosters, they have jets to wake them up here. We caught a picture of six Blue Angel jets flying in formation in front of Signal Mountain, just south of our campground. We read that the jets are often 18 inches apart flying around mach 1 when they are in tight formations.
Denisa would dash outside to watch every time she heard the jets approaching. She was so hard on the door hinges that Mark finally told her to just leave the door open. Sometimes we caught the military helicopters sharing air space with the local birds.
She had cold eggs for breakfast because she couldn't sit and eat breakfast if there were Blue Angels doing loop-de-loops outside.
But we learned that it wasn't a good idea to try to jump in the car to get a closer view of the jets and their acrobatics. More than once we drove their direction, just in time to watch as they fell out of formation and headed back to the area where we had been earlier. It took us a while, but we finally figured out that these jets are faster than our car. So we are learning to be content with watching them fly over the trees of our RV resort.
We are happy with our decision to stay in the desert for a little longer while we let the rest of California dry out from recent flooding. But instead of several restful days in the desert, our schedule filled up as we visited with neighbors about fun things to do in the area. We'll tell you about those in the next blogs!
After camping in Yuma for eight days, we had one final day trip. On our last day, we went to two national wildlife refuges north of Yuma. Our first stop was at the Kofa Refuge, which stretches for 40 miles across the desert. We entered at the most southern entrance, and our paved road quickly turned to gravel. We would drive over ten miles down this road towards our destination. The picture below has the iconic Castle Dome centered down that dusty road.
When the four-wheel-drive road got too rough for our Honda CRV, we parked and took out on foot.
At 3,780 feet, Castle Dome can be seen even in Yuma, and it is the most prominent peak in the area. So of course we turned our hiking boots in that direction.
We hiked a mile up a dry wash, then headed straight up the mountain face in front of us. We have the good camera with us today, and we are ready to see one of the desert big-horn sheep that call the Kofa Refuge home. Estimated to have 400 sheep here, we are hiking up high where they live.
We saw fresh sheep poop, and plenty of hoof prints in the sand, and we have our eyes peeled.
That's when we spotted something on the side of the mountain.
Mark picked up the big-horn sheep skull, surprised at how heavy it was. These guys get a major workout, just lugging those horns around!
We were also surprised at how stinky this skull was. It was filled with stagnate rain water that smelled awful! Mark would have liked to use his hand to close his nose, but he needed both hands to hold up this heavy skull.
We also spotted one of the tallest ocotillo we have ever seen on the side of our mountain. All the rain in this area has certainly made the cacti green this year.
There are no trails here, but hikers are allowed to go wherever they want. So we were looking for the easiest path to the top. We opted for scrambling over the boulders, rather than slipping on the loose small rock called scree.
Denisa is wondering if this climb was a good idea. But she kept going just to see what we could see from the top.
We're not at the top of castle dome, but we did get to the summit of this little mountain. That spire we had seen when we started up this steep climb seemed considerably larger once we were standing next to it. Denisa is standing at the base of the spire, but you'll have to look close to find her.
Once over the lip of this mountain, we could look down into the valley on the other side. Somehow, the obvious shape of Castle Dome has disappeared at this angle.
Of course, Mark found a higher spot to scramble up even further. So he took a picture of Denisa by the the highest spire she was inspired to climb to. From this angle, we can see the valley where our car is parked far, far below.
We're a little sad to know that this is our last tangerine hike of the season. We normally take a half dozen pieces of fruit with us, and it's a great source of energy while quenching our thirst. So we sat in the shade of that tall spire and enjoyed our last tangerine summit, while plotting our strategy for getting down off this thing.
We opted to go down a different face of this peak, hoping it would have less scree and be less steep. We have developed a method of linking arms that makes both of us more stable when we go down a steep and perilous slope. Mark leads the way, and Denisa holds his arm. We have found that having four feet on the ground makes both of us more stable. The extra pressure on his arm saves Mark from falling forward, and Denisa is more stable by having Mark linked in front to catch her. It's amazing how our system has gotten us off a lot of peaks, and it was working again this day.
When we finally got down to flatter terrain, Denisa could once again look around for the signs of spring around us. We found our first wildflower bloom of the day. It was a small solace, since we didn't get to see any live desert big-horn sheep.
We also revisited a cactus friend at the end of our hike. This teddy bear cholla is also known as the jumping cactus. We could see many branches that had made the jump, and were laying on the ground. That's how this plant reproduces. It hopes that one of those jumpers will land in such a way that it will make contact with the soil and root to produce a new plant.
When we got back to the car, our legs felt like jello. Even though Castle Dome had disappeared when we were looking for it, and the desert sheep had evaded us, we had a good hike today. As we drove back down the gravel road, we looked back to see that Castle Dome appeared once more.
Our legs were tired, but we still had plenty of daylight for another stop today. So we made the drive to the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge as well. We stopped in at the visitor center just before they closed, to get the best advice from the volunteer working there. She recommended first a stop at the Martinez Lake, then to one of the overlooks to see the Colorado River making its way through the refuge.
Then she suggested we drive three miles over more rugged dirt roads to the park's Painted Desert Trail.
True to its name, the hills are "painted" from their different mineral content. The trail was a 1.3 mile loop that took us up and down these painted hills. Our legs weren't sure they had given us permission for another hike today.
The sun was low in the sky by now, lighting up the red rocks. We had hoped to see some of the wild burros that reside in this national refuge. But like the sheep, they have eluded us as well.
Denisa found this golden wildflower casting a long shadow as we finished the last of our hikes for the day. This is our last day in the Yuma area, and we've enjoyed some beautiful days in the desert. But now we're ready to head further west down the road tomorrow.
