Petroglyphs, rock hounding, and Jerome

This is the V-Bar-V Heritage Site, where several hundred petroglyphs are found. They were well preserved because the ranch where they are located was privately owned until the mid-1990's when the Forest Service acquired it. And, as you can see, it is roped off so people can only look, not touch. The volunteer there told some interesting stories about the petroglyphs.

We are off to the back roads again and out in the desert on a back country mountain road we ran across a Christmas cactus in full bloom so had to stop and get some pictures. Expecting the bright red to be flowers, we found...

beautiful red berry-like flowers. We took some cuttings (don't tell anyone) to take home and plant but Dick found out later that the little red balls had very fine tines that he got in his fingers, so on second thought we decided that this would not be a good plant to take with us.

We continued into the mountains in hopes of finding some treasures in the rocks. Dick has taken up rock hounding and so we are off in search of precious gems. If you look real close you can see a building at the Brown Springs ranch that is at the end of the road and on the left is what is called a road.

We got up early this morning and spent half a day out in the mountains trying to learn what is there to find. Dick is out on the hillside trying to decide on what to pick up and bring back. We did pick up about 50 pounds of agate and other rocks only to discard most of them when we got back home. This is our first big try at collecting so have a lot to learn. We spent an hour or so talking to the owners of a rock shop in Old Cottonwoon Arizona and got lots of information from them on where to go for different minerals.

Jackie and CC are heading back up the steep jeep trail trying to get out of the sun and find the truck so we can have lunch. Dick is lagging behind still trying to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, except there is no rainbow. We still had a good time and it was nice spending part of a day in the mountains with no one around. We must have traveled about 15 miles without running across any other humans. But who in their right mind would be out here in the first place?

Just as an added attraction to the blog: here are two critters we ran across. This little flying critter was about 1 1/2" long and Dick got the picture and then got the heck out of it's area.

Every place we go we run across these little critters. It's hard to get a close up of them but we lucked out this time. We just can't believe the speed that they can run across the ground.

We spent another day in Jerome, but this time we parked and walked the town. It is an artists' town with lots of galleries. We spent most of the day just looking at all the neat stuff that is produced in this little town. Dick had to stop and take some shots around town and here is the same wall from two different angles. Or should we say "what is left of a wall". Hope you enjoy.

This one was taken from a second story artist gallery down the street.


To be continued...