East Pass - "Officially" Closed

It's one thing to have the BLM put up a sign and close a trail; but, quite another still to have God do it. One of Hugh's - and I suppose mine as well - favorite rides from the Mesquite Nevada area is to run up Beaver Dam Wash, through the Tule Desert past Sam's Camp and over what people call East Pass back into Nevada.

Well he and Gordon just attempted their annual ride and he's just sent in a report that "As of Dec. 17, 2012 East Pass is now officially closed. See attached pictures for documentation."

I've posted a previous article and map of the East Pass route. Thanks for the photos Hugh.

Offroad: Five Canyons Trail

Forty-three miles and a full day will get you out of Mesquite and into the mountains for a great loop around the five major canyons in the Bunkerville Range of the Virgin Mountains; plus a picturesque valley thrown in for good measure.

This is a ride which can easily be done without trailering from Mesquite. It loops from Water Tower Lane in Bunkerville to North Valley before running into the Parashant via the 4,900 ft Lime Kiln Canyon and returning via White Rock Road. It also happens to be what we think is the very best get-acquainted "sampler" ride one can your visitors on.

Although there are roads and trails going up all the canyons which can be navigated by 4-WD vehicles, the trail as shown in the free map accompanying this post is best taken on ATVs, side-by-sides and single tracks due to width, camber and turns. None-the-less, it really is considered beginner level (well, one part is a "strong" beginner level due to incline). [A free Google Earth file of this route is available at: Offroading Home.]

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Offroad: Red Hollow Arch Trails

This is a rather unique post in that it had its origins in an email with a question: "I'm an offroader who loves to travel in mountains with my group on our my bikes and am wondering if there is a 'best way' to get to Red Hollow Arch in southern Utah," or words real close to this.

He went on to say that he was able to see the place on Google Earth, and several trails – at least what looked like trails; but, wanted to begin in Beaver Dam and travel to the arch from Arizona. He wondered if any reader had been there and submitted a recent trail.

Well, I was glad to help; but, there was one problem: I personally had never heard of Red Hollow Arch so didn't have a clue where he was talking about!

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Offroad: Beaver Dam - East Pass Loop

I got a chance to take a ride in Gordon's CanAm and jumped at the opportunity. We joined Hugh and the "Beaver Dam Gang" on their adventure up "The Wash" to "however far we can get before the snow stops us" – not really expecting to get all the way to East Pass, which I think was Hugh's secret goal.

The Beaver Dam Bridge seems, to me at least, to have a new entrance this year after all the repairs to the bridge caused by last years floods. It actually makes it quite easy now for all the town's residents to head to the trails on their ATVs – a major past time activity for them.

There was but the tiniest trickle of water in Beaver Dam Wash this winter but you could tell that there had been major runoff by all the broken limbs and debris strewn along the banks and caught on rocks.

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Offroad: Black Warrior Mine

It's a rare opportunity when Gordon will offer to give up his new pup's "sidekick-seat" to someone, so when it happens you take him up on it. He, dad and I wanted to take a "quick" ride somewhere shortly after Christmas and we ended up heading north up the good ol' highway 91 from Beaver Dam Arizona.

Gordon had ridden the area above Lytle Ranch Road a few weeks before with Hugh and wanted to show us the general area where they went. With plenty of time and no real plans, we stopped at the mouth of the canyon to see the caves that always looked interesting enough to wonder about but not enough to have stopped.

This time we stopped and found… pretty much nothing much. They must have been something at some time but it's probably anyone's guess as to what, this late in the game.

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Offroad: Parashant - Savannic Mine-Tassi Springs Loop

I just noticed that in all the frenetic hustle to pick up stakes and migrate, there were two trails from last riding season which didn't get posted. Nor did their accompanying maps. We have been there before but this time Gordon and I were able to convince dad to ride with us down into "the Parashant".

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Offroad: Parashant - Grand Gultch Mine

I have written about offroad rides to the Grand Gulch area a few times previously: Offroad: Savanic, Offroad: Mine Hunt and Offroad: Tassi Springs. Here is a submitted trail which can test all of the bolts and nuts in your rig – especially the one behind the wheel.

Gordon got a new Can-Am so he and Hugh decided to give it a test run up to one of their favorite locations: Grand Gulch Mine, down there in the Parashant wilderness. The Parashant arm of the Grand Canyon is to the southeast of the Virgin Mountains from Mesquite Nevada. The Grand Gulch Mine is on the bench between Grand Gulch Canyon and North Fork Canyon in western Mohave County, Arizona.

Their ride, taken in late winter from Whitney Junction, turned out to be a 96-mile (round trip) to the mine and back over the same route. It was cool late winter and, of course, taken in their side-by-side UTVs. Even so, they rate the trail very difficult due, in large part, to the portion beyond the Savannic Mine – i.e. over the top to the Grand Gulch.

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The Wilderness of Gold Butte

For some time now I have had the BLMs map of their proposal for turning Gold Butte (and Bunkerville Flats) into a WILDERNESS AREA, glaring at me from the middle of my desk top, not knowing what else to do with it except look at it and shake my head in disgust.

Frankly, as a useable map for making an assessment leading to meaningful comment, it is completely worthless; there, I said it. It is nothing more than an enhanced clone of the map the Las Vegas BLM field office foisted on us when they went through and systematically closed close to fifty or so trail segments a couple of years ago. That map was completely worthless to the public, and so is this.

Absolutely NO geo-location marks! Absolutely no latitude or longitude markings! No road names. For the most part NO readable, meaningful labels! All this leaving even the most basic understanding of where things are, woefully complex and time consuming; beyond what most reasonable people are either able or willing to undertake. Then there's obsessive-compulsive me.

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Offroad: Parashant - Savannic Mine

Little did we know that this snowbird riding season the Parashant Grand Canyon area would be the most interesting rides we would take… several times. And we would go again in a heartbeat.

We've seen it on our maps, and we've always intended to "run over to Arizona and see the mines"; but, it's a long way over there from Whitney Pockets, our usual staging area of choice. Just to Tassi Springs, which we wrote about last year, and back takes a very full day. The Savannic Mine - and others - are farther than that.

However… there is only one other ride on "The Butte" which rivals it for sheer grandeur! The ride over through Pierson Gap and down into Cottonwood Wash looks over the "Hell's Kitchen" area and is Magnificent. The ride along the shelf road, past Pigeon Canyon, is truly breathtaking, in more ways than one.

Of course there's the "breathtaking" grandeur of a Kodak-worthy photograph which even Photoshop cannot improve; then, there's the strangling-tightness which slowly creeps into your chest and makes your heart race for anyone even the least vertiginously challenged!

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Gold Mines of Gold Butte

I have a friend who loves historic Gold Mines… well, all mines actually!   He's never heard about a mine that he didn't want to go visit. To look at them, to walk around them, to explore them and photograph them. He loves to drive his side-by-side up any old mine road to as close as he can get… even if it's straight up.   He's been to so many mines, and has so many mine photographs, we kid him that he must be writing a coffee-table book about them.

And he has chosen a pretty good place to snowbird because hundreds of the things are within a day-trip of his winter-time home. There are more than 40 claims on Gold Butte alone which have historically taken gold in some amount. None, unfortunately, are still in operation; and, as we have previously shown, the BLM is taking great pains to eradicate them from the face of the earth.

Today's map is a neat "network link" that I found at a website (MineCache.com) which will display all the mining claims in a Google Earth viewport which have been known to contain at least some gold.   [A free Google Earth file of this route is available at: Gold Mines of Gold Butte.]

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GEO-tography: Mountains

Black, white, red, blue, brown, rocky, smokey or superstitious – the one thing they all have in common is: they're mountains!

Continuing our series of posts about GEOtography, today we have a collection of photographs that we found on the web about mountains of all sizes, shapes and colors.

Despite their ubiquity around the globe, these photos pretty much tell the tale that: mountains are usually, really off-road.
[Remember, like always, these are full photographs so be patient while they load.]

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Lake Bonneville and the Great Salt Lake

A Google Earth Map of Lake Bonneville is Available

Since the advent of computers I must admit that one of my former favorite hobbies (reading books) has gotten the short end of the stick. I mean, once Wozniak came of age I began finding myself more and more often startled by the 2 am hour while sitting at the keyboard than in the recliner with books like "Hawaii," "Space," "Alaska" and "Mexico."

Ahhh… Michner…   now there was an obsessive/compulsive after my own heart.  When he would write a book about an area he would begin with one asteroid hitting another and forming, what else… the earth.   Then, he would touch on nearly everything in-between like a part of that collision eventually making its way to the gaping maw of a super-giant black hole and succumbing to its gravity; but, not before giving up a tiny gamma ray particle, blasting back in the direction it had come at the moment it was being torn asunder.   Me… I just want to tell you about a female trout in labor far up an isolated arm of a world which seemed to consist mostly of water.

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NEW: Black Joe Mine-Horse Thief Canyon-Keyhole Canyon Trails

In his nearly tireless efforts to GPS track every offroad trail in southern Nevada before he turns 30, Mike took his jeep across "the dam" (or possibly we should call it "THE Dam") the other day with his son and captured two more trails: Black Joe Mine and Horse Thief Canyon.   [A free Google Earth file of this route is available at: OffroadingHome.com/nevada/nevada.htm and is called the "Great Basin SUV Trails: Southern Nevada" map.]

He says his son loves to hike, which is a good thing because both of these trails end in a short hike to mines or the mountains, although at least one requires climbing gear.

As you can see from opening the map in Google Earth, both trail-heads are just a hop-skip-and-a-jump east of Boulder Dam on the Arizona side. ATVs or high-clearance 4WDs are a must on these trails due to rugged terrain and pinch points, and both have primitive camping opportunities.

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Final Lake Havasu Closure Map

With the deadline for public comments screaming down at us - Offroading Home has finally received a last piece of tracking information from the BLM and have published the final trail closure map for the 2010 Travel Management Plan (TMP).

The updated map is located at: Lake Havasu Trail Closure Map and contains all the updated tracking information we have requested from the BLM.

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Havasu Trail Closures

After several "back-and-forths" with the IT department of the Lake Havasu Field Office of the BLM about the maps available for the Travel Management Plan (TMP) - we have now received the map coordinates for all the connecting trails and have finished updating the master map.

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NEW: Havasu BLM Trail Closures

We interrupt our normally scheduled posts for a BLM "Travel Management Plan (TMP)" alert for the Havasu riding area in Arizona.

Offroaders will recognize this term as used by the BLM for the periodic review of all trails in an area to see how many we can "get off the books," so-to-speak – i.e. "close them off for everything except hikers." Which pretty much means: "Close them off to seniors!"

Offroaders who have at all been paying attention also recognize that this process spans several months fraught with hair-tearing frustration over trying to obtain usable information and straight answers from the BLM in order to make your "comments," all the while fending off mis-information and attacks from various "save the dirt" groups.

What makes this TMP a bit unique is that for the first time, in my knowledge, the BLM has…

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Elsewhere Offroad: Take Back Utah, Gold Butte and Havasu

The time has past when it was sufficient for you to simply work your job, attend to your family, and participate in church and local civic functions and just "expect" others (especially your government) to leave your recreation rights alone.

There are battles being fought against the double-talking "fiends" all across the country, who are frenetically pushing the government to "own" everything that isn't paved and basically close it off to everyone except the "elite" who can hike into it.

These three, that I've listed below, are all at different levels of involvement – they are battlefield reports from the "front lines."

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USGS Map Waypoints: Arizona

I have it on good authority that Arizona "felt left out" of what is turning out to be a major life's work for me in these western states USGS waypoint files.

Five hours of work, 43,752 waypoints (including those beginning outside the state) and Fifteen counties later… we have mappage.   [For a free Google Earth file of this route see: Arizona USGS Waypoints]

I never realized that Arizona 7th graders had it so easy in their history class when it came time to memorize the counties in the state – only fifteen. And the file size is only a tenth of California's.

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GPS Maps 104: Satellites, Spheres and Datums

[This post is part four in a multi-part series about understanding the GPS system and its coordinate grid.]

I don't know about you but had I been around in the time of the early navigators and been stuck with doing the job, I'd have been just like most of them: staying up at night trying to find a "happy accident" (like the star Polaris just happening to be squatting permanently above the north pole) in order to make the figuring out of Longitude at least bearable.

They couldn't do it. And knowing what we know now I'm sure I would have wasted my time too – with Hubble we now know that there isn't any such "short-cut". Wind up or battery driven watches seem to be the only answer for Longitude.

However, just cause God didn't give us no Geo-synchronous celestial landmark doesn't mean that we can't… or shouldn't… or haven't made up for the seeming… "oversight."

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USGS Map Waypoints: Montana

I bet no one saw this coming: I completed the file with all the USGS Waypoints for Montana. Neither did I.

Why did I do Montana before Arizona or Colorado, Offroading Homes usual group of states with offroad maps? One reason – I haven't heard anything from readers in either of those states for a long time and I had a brand new trail submission from Montana.

Besides, lest we all forget, this is the state with Yellowstone! They even have a county named: Lewis and Clark!

So 54 hand-coded, mind-numbing counties and 65,249 waypoints later – "we've got mappage!"   [For a free Google Earth file of this route see: Montana USGS Features]

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