Robson's Mining World

It's Holy Week 2016.  The current work cycle on the "casita" at Standing Stones is completed.  The group of Sowers who have been here for a month will be disbursing to their next project and we will be leaving on Monday after Easter to start the journey back to Indy.

But before we leave this part of Arizona, I want to share a great field trip that many of us took recently to Robson's Mining World.  From our campsite here at the retreat center we can see the mountains to the northwest where Robson's is located.







Just 20 miles outside historic Wickenburg, Arizona, Robson's is one of the oldest and best preserved original mining claims in Arizona. This truly unique spot is surrounded by the second largest Saguaro cactus forest in Arizona and encompasses some of the most extensive Yavapai Apache petroglyphs in the state.  Robson's includes artifacts, antiques, books dating back to the 18th century, and much more.


The first claim to mine on the vast property was in 1917 when the Wesley Rush family operated what was then called the Gold Leaf Mine.  In 1924, the mine changed hands to Ned Creighton who renamed it the Nella-Meda Mine in honor of the Rush daughters.  Operation continued for 18 years until the U.S. Government closed down all gold mines.  The mine engineer and caretaker, Harold mason, eventually took over the property until his death in 1979, when Charles and Jeri Robson, restored many of the buildings and added additional facilities including the Hotel.  Western Destinations, a tour company,  acquired the property in 2009.






Although it is open to the public, you have to be interested and determined to drive the ROUGH gravel road up the the village.  Once there, the caretaker and his family are most gracious hosts.

Main street of the "ghost town"

I have to admit that I didn't spend too much time looking at the artifacts and collections.  Another guy and I hiked up the trail/mountain to find the aforementioned petroglyphs.

A giant geode?

It took a LOT of "boulder hopping"  (I was sore and tired the next day) to get to the petroglyphs.  We looked all over for a rock wall or rock outcrop for them, but we were having no luck.  Then I practically tripped over one.























Well, duh, they were on the boulders all around us but we weren't looking for them there.  But once we found one, we began to see many others, too.


















Some of the rock pictures jump right out at you. For others, you have to squint and hold your tongue just right in the corner of your mouth.








We also discovered a cave and this shallow place that had obviously been used as a shelter by some person or animal.  

bones in the shallow shelter

At one point I climbed to the highest point on this ridge where you could look out over the desert for many miles. WOW!

On Monday after Easter we'll be heading north up to the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert near Holbrook, AZ.  We spent a little time there last June, but want to do a more thorough visit on our way home.  Then, we will do an overnight stop in Albuquerque on our way over to the Grand Canyon of Texas near Amarillo.  I'll try to post again from there.

Standing Stones

As you may recall, in my last post we were dry camping on BLM land off Vulture Mine Road west of the  town of Wickenburg.

On Sunday morning we went into town to go to church at Redeemer Lutheran.  We were warmly received and invited to stay for a pot luck lunch following service.   During the service the handbell choir played, the voice choir sang, and a man sang a solo during the offering.  He did a moving rendition of “Where You There When They Crucified My Lord?”  I thought to myself, “That guy has a professional voice.”  And he does.  Turns out it was Dave Anderson of the Dave and Barb Anderson duo.

Dave and Barb were key players in the early contemporary music movement in the Lutheran church.  Go to www.thefellowship.com and click “About” to read more on the Andersons and their music ministry.  And check out their miraculous rescue from the Bearing Sea.  I was quite familiar with Dave & Barb's work from those early days, so I was surprised to find Dave in this small church on Sunday morning.




After service we had a chance to visit with Dave, and so discovered a newer ministry that Dave & Barb spearhead.  It's based, are you ready, in Wickenburg, AZ.  You can visit www.ShepherdsCanyonRetreat.org to learn more about this ministry.

Shepherd's Canyon Retreat is the first Lutheran-based ministry-of-its-kind to provide counseling retreats for burned out and emotionally wounded church workers and their spouses.



Because of events and circumstances in my own pastoral experience, I know this ministry is sorely needed.  I asked Dave if we could talk about it.  He invited us to bring our RV and come out to Standing Stones Retreat Center which is the home of Shepherds Canyon Retreats.


Go to www.standingstonesaz.org to read more about the retreat center.


I mentioned in my last blog that something changed the next 2 weeks of our lives.  Well when we arrived at Standing Stones we found it under construction mostly totally by volunteer labor.  Those who work on the project get a camping spot with full hook-ups in exchange for their labors.

And in the case of Standing Stones, the use of the beautiful patio, pool, hot tub, and outdoor kitchen that came with the original property.  We decided to participate and support the retreat ministry with our labor.

I worked last week and we are planning to work this next week, too.  We will begin our eastward trek toward home early in the week after Easter.



Don't jump to the conclusion that Dave just goes around inviting random RVers to help build a retreat center.  When we arrived we found about a dozen other Rvs parked on the place and their occupants hard at work building the Center's first “Casita.”  All these men and women (many highly skilled tradesmen) belonged to one of two groups, either: Sowers or MBI.  All are retired Christians with a heart to support the church at large with their time and talents by volunteering to literally build the Kingdom.  All they receive for their labors is a campsite with full hook-ups so they can live and work on the project at hand.

More information about these organizations can be found at: 

www.sowerministry.org or www.missionbuilders.org

Remember that I hinted that something might change our lives in the future?  You guessed it.  We are considering joining one of these groups to spend some retirement and RV time building God's Kingdom.  Your thoughts and prayers on the subject will help us make these important decisions.


But all work and no play … well, you know how that goes.  So Saturday, most of us working here took a field trip to Robson's Mining World.  That's the subject of my next post.  See you then.

On to Phoenix and so much more

States where we have camped

After leaving family and Yucca Valley behind, we headed for the BIG city of Phoenix.  

We had hoped to see another cousin (on my dad's side) and his wife  there, but due to a work related accident they were not able to meet us.  We will get to see another cousin (mom's side) and her family next week, however.




We traveled east on hwy 62 to 177 – past the Marine base at 29 Palms and through some of the most exquisitely desolate, yet beautiful desert we have seen.  A sign warned us there were no more services for the next 100 miles.  But there were people living out there!

Exquisitely desolate, yet beautiful desert

The Phoenix suburb of Glendale was a destination because we had solar panels to be installed there.

We had equipped our rig with 4 golf cart batteries and a 2000 watt inverter last fall.  The batteries, of course, store electricity – 440 amp-hours worth. (If you burned a 120 watt light bulb for 1 hour you would used 1 amp-hour of electricity)

The batteries (duh)

The inverter changes 12 volt battery DC electricity (like in your car) into 120 volt AC electricity like in your house.  Basically, this lets us use our coffee maker, microwave, etc just like at home, even when we are not plugged into 120 volt power.

The inverter (bottom) and charge controller (right)

But the batteries are like a water storage tank.  You can use up what's in the tank, but then you have to put more back in.  With batteries, it's called recharging, like you do with your cell phone every night.

The three 160 watt solar panels on the roof of our RV turn sunshine into about 9 amps of electricity per hour (by magic?) and then store it in the aforementioned batteries every day (refilling the tank). A “charge controller” senses when the “tank”is full and shuts off the electricity so the batteries don't get overcharged.

This system allows us to Dry Camp or Boondock without plugging in. We have 90 gallons of water storage and 120 gallons of waste storage in the RV so we can sit for 7-14 days comfortably, depending on how we conserve water.







After we had the solar panels installed, we moved to some BLM (Bureau of Land Management) property (public land owned by the US of A).  The place was a trail-head  for a trail leading the Vulture Creek Mine.  We sat, quite contentedly for the next 5 days letting the sun provide our electricity.

Sunset in the desert from our camp site

The rig with Vulture Mt in the background 

On Sunday morning we attended Redeemer Lutheran Church in Wickenbburg, AZ.  There we met someone there who drastically changed the next 2 weeks of our life.  Then on Monday we met some folks who may drastically change many years of our lives in the future.

Come back and read my next post to find out how.

Yucca Valley

We had a great time at the Zoo, but now it was time to do something even more special - visit my cousin & his wife whom I haven't seen for MANY years. He lives in Yucca Valley, CA, only a few hours drive from where we camped.

It was an easy drive up I-15 & I-210 and east in I-10 to the Palm Springs area where we went up to the high desert and Yucca Valley.  But talk about traffic!!!  

In Yucca Valley we didn't camp, but were the guests in my cousin's home.  He and his wife were the most gracious and hospitable hosts.  We did a lot of visiting and reminiscing and went to visit my uncle Bill who lives near by.  (Family pictures are not included here to respect privacy.)

However one thing I can show pictures of is our great experience at Pioneertown and Joshua Tree National Park.

Pioneertown started as a live-in Old West motion-picture set, built in the 1940s. The set was designed to provide a place for the actors to live while using their homes in the movie. A number of Westerns and early television shows were filmed in Pioneertown, including The Cisco Kid and Edgar Buchanan's Judge Roy Bean.

The Pioneer Bowl

Roy Rogers, Dick Curtis, and Russell Hayden were among the original developers and investors, and Gene Autry frequently taped his show at the six-lane Pioneer Bowl bowling alley. It was built in 1947 and Rogers himself rolled out the first ball in 1949. School-age children were hired as pinsetters until the installation of automatic pinsetting equipment in the 1950s. According to the Morongo Basin Historical Society, the bowling alley is one of the oldest in continuous use in California.

Darlene was excited to find a music store, but the didn't have any pipe organ selections.  Now she'll have to take up the "squeeze box."

I didn't do it!!!

I looked carefully to see if it said "Gardels."

After I was released from jail in Pioneertown, we drove the few miles over to Joshua Tree NP (see the map above).

Humans have occupied the area encompassed by Joshua Tree National Park's nearly 800,000 acres for thousands of years. 

Two distinct desert ecosystems, the Mojave and the Colorado (part of the Sonoran), come together in Joshua Tree National Park. A fascinating variety of plants and animals make their homes in a land sculpted by strong winds and occasional torrents of rain. Dark night skies, a rich cultural history, and surreal geologic features add to the wonder of this vast wilderness in southern California.

This Joshua Tree is as old as we are, but far more prickly!!

Known as the park namesake, the Joshua tree, Yucca brevifolia, is a member of the Agave family. The Joshua tree provides a good indicator that you are in the Mojave Desert, but you may also find it growing next to a saguaro cactus in the Sonoran Desert in western Arizona or mixed with pines in the San Bernardino Mountains.

A Joshua Tree blooming

The geologic landscape of Joshua Tree is fascinating.  Geologists believe the face of our modern landscape was born when molten liquid rock, heated by the continuous movement of Earth’s crust, oozed upward and cooled while still below the surface. These plutonic intrusions are  called monzogranite.

The monzogranite developed a system of rectangular joints. One set, oriented roughly horizontally, resulted from the removal—by erosion—of the miles of overlying rock, called gneiss (pronounced “nice”). Another set of joints is oriented vertically, roughly paralleling the contact of the monzogranite with its surrounding rocks. The third set is also vertical but cuts the second set at high angles. The resulting system of joints tended to develop rectangular blocks.

As ground water percolated down through the monzogranite’s joint fractures, it began to transform some hard mineral grains along its path into soft clay, while it loosened and freed grains resistant to solution. Rectangular stones slowly weathered to spheres of hard rock surrounded by soft clay containing loose mineral grains. Imagine holding an ice cube under the faucet. The cube rounds away at the corners first, because that is the part most exposed to the force of the water. A similar thing happened here on a grand scale during a much wetter climate.

After the arrival of the arid climate of recent times, flash floods began washing away the protective ground surface. As they were exposed, the huge eroded boulders settled one on top of another, creating those impressive rock piles we see today. 

From one scenic overlook you can see for MILES.  

The Salton Sea from a scenic overlook in Joshua Tree

The day we went to Joshua Tree was cold and cloudy, with a hint of rain.  All this is a rarity in the desert, but still made for great sightseeing.

I kidded my cousin that if they couldn't come up with any better weather, we would have to move on.  We bid a fond farewell to Uncle Bill, Paula, & Bob and set out for the Phoenix area.

In the Phoenix suburb of Glendale we made an addition to the RV.  Come back to find out what.