Racing through Arizona (March 15)

The nice hotel bed in Yuma was a well deserved break for everyone. All of us had had very busy weeks preparing for this trip, all of us had little sleep the previous night for one reason or another, and our day got three hours longer upon arrival in Phoenix. Even though some of us were itching to use our new roof top tents, the thought of making camp in the dark and very tired just wasn't that appealing.

We woke up on Sunday and all of us set out to reorganize our cargo in the parking lot at the hotel. The previous day of light wheeling had revealed problems such as poor visibility and loose objects bouncing around in the cabin that we were all trying to resolve.

Out of Yuma we started driving NW, eventually to get to the Parker 400 race course. Our itinerary took us through some tough Arizona back country terrain, including some spots of moderate difficulty, where Kakie's navigation skills were put to the test, as we crossed the hills and canyons on barely visible trails. At least once the trail indicated by the GPS map simply ended on a rock wall.

Before getting to the race course we did a run through an easy trail nearby, that we sped through as a means of making it more interesting. These are trucks, not rally cars, so "sped through" means as fast as we dared go through the obstacles without ejecting everything tied up to our roof racks. In other words: not really that fast. At least until we reached the race course. There things got decidedly faster.

The Parker 400 race course is a desert truck racing stage. It's a dirt track where most of it is leveled, which allowed a handful of East Coast desperados in their FJs to tear through at 60 to 80 mph. There were quite a few very deep dips, in which somehow none of use managed to fly into, especially when one accounts for the dust raised by the forward vehicles. The thick, white dust in the sunset light made it impossible to see anything more than 10 m ahead, unless you gave the vehicle ahead of you at least 100 m of lead, and as long as there was some wind.

We decided to end the day by camping on the BLM land, just off the track, on a small hilltop. And then it was dinner, chat around the imaginary camp fire (we weren't certain about the regulations on camp fires, so we didn't light one) admiring the beauty of the backcountry night sky, and finally off to our tents for a good night of sleep.