So… after visiting the site in Quartzsite we headed south on 95 towards Yuma and turned into the Kofa Mountain National Wildlife Refuge. 

Then a Ranger vehicle pulled up and the Ranger got out and we were thinking… “ut oh, what did we do wrong.”

It’s Ranger Jim just giving us a copy of the rules so we had them, LOL. 

The Ocotillo was in full greenery…

… and in bloom.  You only see that in March!

So, we took the trail and found these in the Rhyolite bedrock… grinding holes.

and more grinding holes…

This guy didn’t make them…

Then we walked up the trail a tiny ways… and saw these large holes in the bedrock holding water.  This was surprising because it had rained about a month prior.  These are called “The Tanks”.  Mother Nature’s water tanks for critters and were probably used by those first North Americans when they lived here.

Scattered deposits of this white stuff was dried salt that collected here in the water that ran over the rocks.  This is what they call “desert salt”.  I tasted it, it was salty.

So we kept following the trail along the tanks… until we found a huge tank.  Notice the water line from prior water levels.

As we headed back out the trail, we looked up at the rock cliff on our left where Ranger Jim told us were some petroglyphs, but we didn’t see them…

The rock cliff face was pretty amazing though…

I can just imagine someone using these crevices as shelters many, many moons before this.

The color of most of the rocks in the region is due to desert varnish.  When rockhounding, you have to knock a chunk off to see the real color.  Desert varnish occurs when tiny particles of clay are blown onto the rock surface, then coated with dew, baked in the sun.  The clay acts as a substrate which collects other substances and causes a chemical reaction.  Pretty darned neat, when you think about it.

Again, our views were gorgeous!

Time to take the trail home.