Sunday, May 1, 2016 

Happy May Day to everyone!  I remember as a kid, that we made May Baskets and filled them with wildflowers, such as Violets, Dutchmen's Britches, and wild Geraniums and would hang them on the door knob of the elderly.  We lived in the country, so by the time we got to the last ones, the flowers were pretty droopy!  This was our last day in this area, so we went geo-caching and we had a great find!  We did an area where RVer's dry camp on a mesa overlooking huge washes, with the mountains in the background.  The one cache is called, 'Better than Wal-mart'.  For you non-RVer's, people sometimes stay in Wal-mart parking lot, for free if they are just passing through.  This definitely beats Wal-mart!  We did a series of caches placed here by one guy and it happened to be a snake series.  That is a bit daunting to begin with, so we kept our eyes peeled and ears tuned in for that familiar sound.  We didn't see any snakes, but we did find a Desert Tortoise.  Jim saw him first, and he was just out eating the plants in the desert.  We had just had some rain yesterday, and that usually brings them out.  This was much bigger than the one we had previously seen in Joshua Tree NP.  We are so lucky to have found another one, as they are quite rare.  The ground here was full of small stones and very hard and dry, so I can't imagine him digging himself into the ground, but his hind legs are very strong.  There was a reason why we couldn't move today, and we're happy for it.

 This is just a portion of the RV parking area on the mesa.  We saw all kinds of RV's here from very old '70's models to the 45 feet long diesel pushers.  It shows that they all love the beauty of the land.

 The Desert Tortoise was busy eating the plants that were along our caching route.  He was huge! I reported previously, that they are endangered, but we recently found out that they are threatened.  Nonetheless, it is rare to see them in the wild. 

We thought of our hiking buddies, Glen G., Viv and Arlene when we had to walk out on this little stretch that drops off on both sides into a deep canyon/wash area.  Of course, we were after a cache!