Ironwood Forest Shakedown

Our new tow vehicle/short term camper is far from complete, but we’re at a point that we wanted to take it out for its inaugural run.  Ironwood Forest National Monument is only about an hour from our house, and very close to Marana and Tucson, so it seemed like the perfect place to go.  If we had any problems, we would have a lot of resources available.  It was early in the day, so rather than find a camp spot, we decided to do some exploring first.

We took a walk on the back side of Ragged Top Mountain and found the remnants of an old settlement of some sort.

It was fun to see the mountain from this perspective.  Last time we were here, we only saw it from the north side.

When we had enough exploring, we headed back to the north side, where we had met a nice couple (Dave and Kathy) earlier in the day.  They had said that they’d be happy to share the group camping area with us, so we found a flat spot several sites away from them and started settling in for our first night.  Once we got the camper popped up, which took about 2 minutes, I started working on dinner.  We kept it simple with fried potatoes and burgers with carmelized onions.

Bon Appetit!

We had beautiful weather and a beautiful sunset for our first night out, and everything is working perfectly!  We couldn’t ask for more than that!

We were a little bit surprised by the amount of traffic that came through the park during the night. We assumed that it was a few late-comers still looking for a spot to camp, but it sounded like they were moving along awfully quickly for that.  Other than the cars, it was a very peaceful nights sleep.  We woke in the morning to the songs of the birds.  We had the tent flaps zipped closed, so it was still pitch black inside our tent.  But we knew it must be morning.  When we came out, we were greeted by this bird, all fluffed up, trying to stay warm.

Before we headed out for the day, Steve took a few pictures of the new rig in our first-ever camp site.

After hearing cars during the night, we decided to continue Down Silverbell Road too see where it went.