A1 Mountain Road - driven out by the dust!

I wanted to check out the dispersed camping at A1 Mountain Road, and when we left Willard Springs, we headed there.  It's in the Coconino National Forest - 6.6 miles west of Flagstaff, off I40.   This is the road we came in on, and just pulled off to the left and stopped.  Easy, peasy.  Good road, and tons of flowers. 

It's nice that it's so close to Flagstaff.  I found a level, solar friendly site right along the main forest road, and I set up camp.  The weather was perfect and we settled in.  Then a huge lumber truck went past us on the road, in a cloud of dust - you can see in the photo above how close we were to the road. A while later he drove past us the other way, loaded with huge tree trunks.  This went on all day, for two days.  It wasn't terrible, but on Friday I was thinking, it'll be a calm, quiet weekend, then I'll see if I want to head on to other places.

(There are other roads running off this main road that I could have moved to, but honestly, I had just experienced two "oops" moments when I drove too close to a large round rock and damaged the step on The Palms, then a little later, brushed the corner of the roof past some small, leafy branches and got a little dent from a sharp branch that I didn't realize was so unmoving (it looked like some easy, leafy branches to swish past, which I've done many times), and I needed to stay on easy roads at this point.  Sometimes boondocking can be rough for a solo driver, constantly jumping in and out of the rig to check clearances, but both these times I didn't think I'd have a problem clearing the rock and the branch.  These things happen, and no permanent damage was done.)

We were parked in the middle of a field of flowers, and I picked some to put in The Palms.  I love having fresh flowers.  I hung them on the knob of my beautiful pantry door.  I'm collecting photos to blow up and hang on the walls of my future Park Model - this one might make the cut.  I love the way it looks:

Saturday morning started at 3:00 am, with traffic on the road.  It sounded like another big truck, but it sure was early.  I went back to sleep, and when I woke up in the morning and looked out the window, there was a line of pick-up trucks, some towing flatbed trailers, as far as I could see in either direction.  They were crawling along, no problem dust-wise, but when the traffic started moving, it became really dusty, of course.  I wondered what was going on!

After a while, trucks started coming back past us in the other direction loaded down with truck beds and trailers full of cut firewood.  Must have been the smaller pieces from the harvested tree trunks the logging trucks carried.  This went on most of the day.  I really liked our site and didn't want to move, and thought, tomorrow's Sunday.  It'll be quiet.  I kept The Palms completely buttoned up all day and night to keep the dust out.  The Palms is pretty tight, and I don't usually get dust inside unless I leave something open.  But it was a really nice day, and I wanted the door and windows open!

Sunday morning, I woke up and another pick-up truck drove by with a bed full of firewood.  Within 15 minutes we were on the road.   It's a good area to boondock, I think we were just there at the wrong time, and next time, I'll check out some of the side roads, which I know have lots of room for campers.

While we were there we had a Harvest Moon, and we had a perfect view right across the street from The Palms:

Onward and southward - we are now in the Sedona/Cottonwood/Camp Verde area, where we have two forests between the three locations.  That makes it nice - 14 days are allowed in one forest, then I can shop, dump the tanks, get water and propane and drive to the other forest for another 14 days.  That's the plan until - probably - November, when we'll head down to the Quartzsite area.  It should be perfect weather then and I'm looking forward to being in Quartzsite again.

Don't forget the VP debate tonight - I'm looking forward to it.

From me and Katie, have a great Tuesday, everyone!  💗💗