Friday and Saturday, December 6 and 7, 2024 (Painted Rock Petroglyphs Site and Campground, Arizona)

We pulled out of West Pinal County park at about 10:00 and continued west on I-8 until we reached exit 102 for Painted Rock Road...

After 11 miles, we reached Painted Rock Petroglyph Site and Campground, a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) site.

The campground is huge and really spread out offering sites with picnic tables and firepits...no services other than trash dumpsters and a couple of pit toilets. After driving through one of the loops, we carried onto another and finally chose site #35, a large site right on the wash...

Payment can only be made using the Recreation.gov App...luckily I had heard of this and had already downloaded the app. We decided to pay for 2 nights...$8/night plus a $1.50 service charge.

After we got all set up, we went for a walk down to the petroglyphs...a fair distance because we chose to set up camp at the far end of the campground. 

We started by reading the story boards...

And then went on the short loop trail around the rocks...

Wow...these are the most we've ever seen!

Almost half the hill on this one side is covered with them all the way to the top... 

Steve took a 2:13 minute video of the petroglyphs...

View looking back as we head back to the trailer...

Another view of our huge site...

We enjoyed happy hour outside overlooking the wash...

No clouds but we still had a very nice sunset...

Well, we had checked out the petroglyphs yesterday, so we really didn't have anything to "see" in the area Saturday (Dec. 7). But we had paid for 2 nights, so we basically had a "down day", getting caught up on some blog updates, and reading. Now if we still had our quads we could have explored some trails right from the campground. It was another beautiful sunny day with temperatures in the mid 70s F/ 20s C...with a light breeze. 

Steve took his drone up and took a video of the area...

It was such a lovely evening, Steve decided to get out the campfire-in-a-can...the first time this trip! I had made spaghetti sauce earlier, so all I had to do was cook some noodles and heat up the sauce...we ate our dinner outside enjoying the fire as the sun went down. Not quite as brilliant a sunset tonight as last night...

And the view the other direction...

And that ends our time at Painted Rock Petroglyph Site and Campground...tomorrow we are off to Quartzsite!