Today we had in mind a relatively laid back day with some driving along two roads on the border, one to the east of the highway that we had never explored before, and one to the west that we drove last time, but we had a few new ideas in mind for exploration there. After a delicious breakfast of frittata with corn, onions, and peppers served with breakfast sausage, avocado with sour cream, and cilantro, we headed south again toward Organ Pipe.
We first drove the road to the east, toward Gachado Line Camp/well and ultimately Dos Lomitas Ranch. Our first stop was the line camp which was really cool. We explored the camp while listening to roosters, cows and people at work across the border. There was a mysterious BM on the topo map somewhere in this area, but only one map (100K scale) indicated its position with an X that I could use to try to interpolate coordinates. I didn’t expect much from a map of that scale, and unfortunately we weren’t able to find anything at the site. We looked all over for probably 20 minutes and found lots of interesting debris from the site, but nothing to do with the benchmark.
Moving on, the road curved south to travel right alongside the border. in this spot there is a high fence that unfortunately partially blocked our view, and limited our photo-taking, of the obelisk that serves as the border monument. The RMs were supposedly set along the fenceline, but we couldn’t see them, and of course couldn’t get close enough for a true search.There was a dirt berm along the road on the Mexican side which may easily have been pushed up over the RMs, concealing them.
Our main goal for the morning was to look for the tri-station SHACK atop a small hill near the ranch. We weren’t sure how best to approach it at first, so we held off for a bit and continued on. We drove as far as the public is allowed on the road, to the Dos Lomitas Ranch/Blankenship Well. This was really neat! A neat little house, partially restored, and some other relics of past ranching operations in this area.
After exploring the ranch, we backtracked along the road and found a pulloff that we thought would be a good starting point for our hike to SHACK. The straight line distance from this spot was .32 miles and the peak wasn’t too high - looked easily doable. And it was! The first part of the hike was over low ground and a wash, quite easy. We began climbing and the surface became loose and rocky, and eventually turned to large, but still loose boulders. We had to climb over one small summit before we reached the correct one, but we saw a gorgeous, large senita cactus at the first summit that excited both of us. We picked our way to the true summit and R sent me ahead to find the mark, which I did! So cool, and it reminded us both of some of our old tri-station adventures. The RMs were also easy to find. Interestingly, it seems that SHACK was also the azimuth mark for the boundary monument we found earlier.
WeE got a little bit off track on our way back down, but it wasn’t much of a problem, just had to do a little bushwhacking through more jungle-like material than we would have expected. Speaking of jungle, it was surprisingly humid today and yesterday! We saw several quails on our travels today.
We drove back out to the highway and crossed over to begin our adventure on the western side, along Puerto Blanco Drive,which also parallels the border. We searched for 4 BMs along the first part of the road (finding 3) and then another 4 toward the end of the road at Quitobaquito Spring. Again, we found 3 of these 4. No idea where those missing 2 are! When we got to the spring we set off to look for the grave we missed last time. We started off a little farther away than we should have but we eventually made our way there. It helped tht we cold see the cross from another hill at a distance. It was very interesting to see the inscription on the grave as well as all the trinkets people had left for him.
Bone rattling all the way back, seeing a coyote, and Garmin thinking we were going to San Diego and trying to send us to Mexican highway 2. Got back to town around 5:30 and went o the Agave Grill (only thing open for supper other than Pizza Hut). Very busy, slow service but friendly and good burgers. We each had a burger with pepper jack cheese, R had regular fries nd I had sweet potato. Negra Modelo to drink. No bill was provided so R eventually went up to the register and paid so we could get out of there and go rest!