We left Woodland at 6:30am this morning on the first leg of our journey. Our destination for today was Owl Canyon Campground about 8 miles north of Barstow, California.
We stopped approximately
every hour to stretch our legs and arrived at the campground around 4:15pm. Weather
was good most of the way. It was raining in Woodland when we left and stopped
shortly after we got on Hwy 99 in Sacramento. Traffic was good most of the way.
No road construction to hold us up.
When we planned the trip,
we tried to make each day’s destination no longer than a 7 hour drive. Many
days fall more in the 5-to-6-hour range. This gives us time to explore if we
choose to do so and still get to our destination while it is daylight.
Our route was I-5 to Hy 99
to Hwy 58 and then dirt roads for about 6 miles to the campground. We
especially enjoyed the Mojave dessert landscape. We also saw the aftereffects
of a train derailment alongside a mountain. Joe ‘Googled’ train derailments and
discovered the incident happened in January 2023. Cleanup started and was put
on hold until repairs to the tracks can be finished up. Nobody was hurt in the incident
and there were no chemicals involved. The railcars held materials for track
repairs. It was a bit disconcerting to look up at green vegetation and see
colorful railcars laying on the mountainside.
Then when we were about an
hour out from Barstow we saw a sign for a visitor’s center for a Borax Mining
company (near Boron). We decided to check it out! The trip to the Rio Tinto Borax
Operation was of great interest to both of us. The woman at the visitor center greeted
us at the door, showed us a video about the plant itself, gave us samples of
what they mine, and at the end gave us mining coloring books for Charlotte and
Caleb (our grandchildren). We wondered around the museum for an hour or so
before heading outside in the wind to checkout the open mining operation. The
pit is 1000 feet below the surface and 2 miles long and a mile wide. The
outdoor photos were taken from an observation deck at the visitors center which
sits on a hill above the plant and mine.
We learned that Borax is
used in a wise variety of products- I knew about soap products but had no idea
that it was used in ceramics, insulation, our mobile phones, fertilizers, porcelain
enamels, borax combined with chlorine makes for a safer pool cleaner. And on
and on. I took lots of photos and posted them on Facebook and will include a couple of them
here.
Tomorrow, we head to the
Grand Canyon where we will stay at the Mather Campground for two nights.
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