Living and Learning from the Desert

I remember our last camping experience in the desert before the boy's had to enroll in school. We had a chevy stepvan then, with bunkbeds in the back built by my husband. We were invited to visit Arizona by some folks we met at Buckskin Joe, near Canon City, Colorado, during our previous visits to Colorado. We found a dirt road leading into the desert from the highway near Apache Junction, Az. We parked along side a nice dry wash. Did some Gold Prospecting and seached for Arrowheads, Driftwood and such. We came upon a natural spring along the top of the bank of the wash, about five foot up. My husband put holes in a tin coffee can and attached the can to a shrub just under the spring. We now had a shower! Ice cold, but in the heat of the day it was great!
We had the neccessary camping equipment to cook, and light our camping area with and a huge ice chest that kept our food cold. Once a week we drove into town to replenish our supplies and do laundry.
We met several interesting people while we camped out in the desert. On one of our return trips we were followed into our camp spot. The gentleman introduced himself and we found out he owned the mining claim area we were on. After a nice visit with him he asked if we would be interested in staying in a little trailer he had set up a little farther down the road, as watchmen. We agreed and we spent the rest of the summer and part of the fall there.
My husband built an outdoor potty house but did not take the time to cut out the hole inside; we never used it. An unexpected visitor driving by stopped and ran to it and went inside. He came out shaking his head and took off.
It turned out that the trailer was between two washes and when it rained they both ran with water! So we learned about getting to high ground when in doubt about what would happen to the trailer. It stayed securely in it's spot!
One day we had visitors who were a little lost. After a nice visit we invited them to stay for dinner. They were from back east and were on their honeymoon, never been out west. After we ate they took notice of our attire and asked why we all had our long socks over the bottoms of our pants. So we commenced to explain about the desert in the evenings how scorpions and snakes start to move about and all of a sudden they had to leave!
Before our experience here was over we met another visitor; actually we picked this hitch-hiker up on one of our trips back from town after checking out his story. He just finished working in a carnival, sitting on the biggest cooler we had ever seen! Spending a week with us in the desert we learned how to skin a rattlesnake, cook it, de-bone it and make rattlesnake vertebrae necklaces! The hitch-hiker said we would be in his book he was writing,"Five Hundred Thousand Miles by the Educated Thumb".
We met one more person out here that summer who turned out to be my husband's first prospecting buddy. That will be another story! I, Cindy, wrote this story.