Small Home – Big Yard

We’ve arrived in Quartzsite on Friday 1/20 and joined the Montana Owners Club dry-camping on BLM land about 6 miles north of town.  This is an annual gathering for the owners club and we had a total of 21 rigs in the circle before our departure on 1/24.  We’re only here 4 nights, but that’s about maximum before needing either more fresh water or less gray water in our holding tanks.

Weather is chilly, and reportedly about 10 degrees off from normal highs.  Instead of 70’s, the daytimes struggle to reach 60.  All 4 nights of our stay, lows reached into the mid to lower 30’s.  And, the winds didn’t help – often gusting to around 20 MPH, it made the wind-chill even worse.

With several hours of furnace overnight, the batteries were nearly 50% discharged each morning.  The solar did an adequate job of recharging the batteries, except on one cloudy day.  Even with the solar, we opted for 4 or 5 hours of generator each evening after sunset just to keep things topped up as we ran the pump for showers and watched a few hours of TV.

Speaking of TV – there is surprisingly NO over the air signals that reach to this desert location.  We would have expected repeaters from either Yuma or Phoenix to provide at least main network coverage, but our antenna could find nothing.  However T-Mobile worked very well in this location, and we were able to use our hotspot for Roku access.  We tried using our Verizon hotspot, but initially – even with a great signal – there was virtually no bandwidth.  However, on Sunday and Monday the access returned with downloads running along at about 12MB and uploads at 3MB. Someone must have rebooted the tower!

Even with cooler than expected temps, our 4 days of boondocking on BLM land worked fine.  We had plenty of power and propane to keep warm and some great campfires to meet others around.  Next stop, Cattail Cove State Park, along Lake Havasu and the Colorado River.  More from there…