Today (Sunday March 16, 2014), was the beginning of Jess, her brother Grant, and my's grand Spring Break road trip through northern Arizona and surrounding states. Grant was flying in from Des Moines , IA via Minneapolis, MN. Of course, one can not simply fly into Phoenix without some slight hiccup; Grants flight was delayed for maintenance by an hour or so, but at least he didn't lose his baggage, and driving through Phoenix was not as bad as it could have been. We even managed to grab In-N-Out before leaving the Phoenix area, just so Grant could have a taste.
Our first leg of the journey was to take I-10 West from Phoenix to the California border. There are many boring roads, and this is one of them, in my opinion. Granted, there are plenty of mountains to view, but for the most part they are in the distance and not very novel in any way. There are also, simply no towns or cities between Phoenix and Blythe. This makes it so that there are relatively few letterboxes between each end.
Fortunately, there is at least one in La Paz County. And more fortunately, it is an AZRoadie box which I need to complete my Roadie 15 challenge, wherein I have to get one of Roadie's boxes in each of the 15 Arizona counties. Over the past year I have been slowly checking the counties off and at the beginning of the trip I only had 3 left and I deliberately planned the trip so that I could at least get two more.
Once we got to the Arizona-California border we turned north off of I-10 onto a little known, little traveled road that runs from the pseudo-Ghosttown of Ehrenberg to Parker. I chose to take this route for one reason only. The Ghost Town of La Paz, Arizona.
Essentially, La Paz, Arizona was a gold boom town founded in 1862 along the Colorado River. It had a substantial population, enough so that it was even the county seat of Yuma County from 1864 to 1870. Then the Colorado River moved more westward and the gold dried up. What population remained moved to nearby Ehrenberg and the town disappeared. Then in 1983, Arizona Congress passed legislation creating the 15th county, which residents decided (for what reason I havent a clue) to name there county after the long dead town of La Paz.
As I am completing my county letterbox series, I found it then appropriate to leave the La Paz county box somewhere near the ghost town.
Of course, finding the Ghost town is half the battle. There are no definitive websites that give exact locations and direction to how to get there. The best I received was 5.8 miles north of I-10. What few maps I could find were not very detailed (all the more reason to get the Ghost Town book I saw at the NP bookstore) and the historic marker that is supposed to mark the site has address marked "undisclosed". Not even a geocache! To make matters more complicated, most of the area is on the Colorado River Indian Reservation.
But, after some extensive research and google map hunting I got the general location of the ruins. And when we drove there, I wasn't too far off. What I thought was the town proper turned out to be the remains of an Indian Concentration Camp (or so says the memorial, I personally think it might by La Paz). But we did find some old gold ore processing sites even one with a completely intact hopper. Appeased (but not content) I decided to leave the box near this location if only for the sake of my wife and brother in law.
From the plant site, we continued up the road to Parker, AZ and joined up with AZ Route 95. As we neared Lake Havasu, we took a slight detour to cross the Parker Dam and go into California, just to say we did. Parker Dam is the "deepest dam in the world" although it doesn't look like it as most of the dam is covered by water on both sides. We looked for a box by Snake Doctor, but it appeared to be missing.
We then finished our journey by continuing up AZ Route 95 to Lake Havasu City where we stayed at a rather sketchy Travel Inn and had dinner at a nice restaurant. All things said and done, we drove just over 300 miles from Tucson to Lake Havasu City.
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