Friday, November 16, 2012 (Travel to Oxbow BLM Campground, Palo Verde, CA)

We were a little later getting away than we had planned this morning.  The fellow from across the way came over and started chatting with Steve...we have been here for over a week and so have they but we rarely saw them...but today, when we are trying to get packed up, that’s when he decides to come over.  We wish that we had chatted with them much earlier in our stay because Don and his wife, Gail are a wealth of information about the southern Arizona/California area.  They have a class A motorhome that is a toy-hauler...the back opens and they carry 2 ATV’s inside...I have never seen a motorhome toy-hauler.

It was about 11:30 by the time we had finished dumping at the Empire Landing Campground just down the road.  Today we are heading south towards Blythe, CA.  We had originally thought that we would go to a BLM Long Term Visitors Area (LTVA) called Midland which is about 7 miles north of Blythe but after talking with Don and Gail this morning, we decided to go to the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge.  It’s on the Arizona side of the Colorado River.  Don and Gail said that they just camped in the BLM dispersed camping area behind the refuge but there was also a BLM campground just across the river on the California side.  We figured it was one that I had found while researching the BLM website.  So we had a couple of choices and could decide once we got there.

We took California State Highway 62 east to the junction of highway 95 where there was an Agriculture Produce Checkpoint.  My first thought was...oh great, I just stocked up on veggies and now they are going to confiscate them because you can’t bring them into California from Arizona...but all was okay.  Hmmm...I wonder what you are not allowed to bring into California.

From there, we took highway 95 south to Interstate 10 and west into Blythe.  We went from rugged mountains and desert...

...to lush agricultural land; quite a contrast...

Even cotton fields...

We filled up with fresh water at Miller Park in Blythe...

...and then continued another couple of miles west on I-10 before taking highway 78 south.  We drove passed acres and acres of agricultural land...

 

Lots of canals filled from the Colorado River to water the fields...

After driving for awhile, we came to the turnoff that Serena (GPS) told us to take to Cibola National Wildlife Refuge...hmmm...there wasn’t a sign indicating this was the turnoff.  Serena has been known to lead us astray at times and this was one of them.  We drove a little further until we found a place where we could turn around.  There also happened to be a road maintenance worker there so Steve got out to ask him for directions.  That didn’t prove to be much help...he hadn’t heard of Oxbow BLM Campground and all he knew about the road into the wildlife refuge was that it was really bumpy.  So we just continued back along the highway...the info I had on Oxbow BLM Campground was that the turnoff was 3 miles south of Palo Verde.  We came across a road with a sign that indicated Cibola boat launch but no indication of Oxbow BLM Campground.  Normally the BLM areas are very well marked. We were still a little leery...it is a gravel road and we definitely do not like taking our rig down a road when we do not know if we will be able to turnaround.  

Just passed the intersection there was a couple doing some work...turned out they were contractors installing DSL cable and weren’t from here...great!  But we determined that the road that we had just passed was likely the road that we were looking for so we turned around and decided to give it a try.  As we turned onto the road, there was a pickup truck coming in the opposite direction; he stopped and we asked him if this was the road to Oxbow...yes it is...yay!

We found the campground, parked the truck and took a walk through it.  There was no one else camped there other than the camp host...and they weren’t home.  There was one nice spot right on the river that we liked but we decided to carry onto the refuge to see what it was like.  When we left the main campground, we realized that there were also sites on the other side of the road...so there were some other people camped here after all.

We drove across the bridge over to the Arizona side...

...through the community of Cibola and finally to the wildlife refuge.  We went inside and spoke to them about camping in the area.  We found that there was no camping allowed in the refuge itself but anywhere across the road on the east side was open BLM land.

We decided to go back to Oxbow to the site on the river.  Getting into the spot turned out to be a bit of an issue...we just couldn’t make it around a big tree, so we ended up backing into the spot.

After getting all set up, we sat out and relaxed as the sun went down.

The bridge in the background goes over to Arizona...