A Saturday not to remember.....

6:56 am - Sunday - November 26th - GNHS - 51° F, humidity 51%, wind 8 mph out of the north.....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 68° F.  On this date in 2021 TLE and I were boondocking at Octotillo Wells (across the Salta Sea from our present location) with our kids, and extended families.....↴ 

That's our trailer in the foreground

Saturday was one of those days.  To begin the day we had 5 bookings in hand, and by 10 am we had rented 7 units (5 RZRs, and 2 two seat Generals).  Getting them checked out was the easy part.  The rest of the day was one for the books, ending with one of our customers rolling over one of the 2 seat Generals around 4:30 pm, when they should have already returned the unit.  They were about 5 miles out towards the bat caves.  Finding someone in broad daylight in the broad expanse of the this BLM acreage is difficult, but at night it becomes almost impossible.  BUT, I get ahead of myself.

Around noon time TLE came out of the office to tell Hunter and I that one of our RZR rentals had shown up at Slab City, about 20 miles from here.  Anything to the southeast of us is expressly off limits.  Sometimes the trackers take a while to update, and the previous time this RZR had updated it was where it should be, but it didn't update for about 40 minutes, and suddenly they were way down at Slab City.  TLE called them, and advised them they needed to return immediately.  I don't know why people think they're going to get over on us.  We tell them right up front not to go to certain places, and that we will know if they do.  At any rate, within 40 minutes they had returned to the BLM land.....no harm, no foul so far.

Around 4 pm one of our RZRs returned completely, and I mean completely, covered in mud about an inch, or more thick....the kind of clay rich mud that will turn to concrete if you don't wash it immediately, so that is what I got busy doing.  It took me until after 5 pm to get all the heavy mud off, and just before I finished TLE walked over to the wash station with the final bit of bad news.....the news about the rolled General 2 seater.....  

This is after I spent an hour last night cleaning off the mud in the dark....it is still filthy, and I'll have to wash it again Sunday....lol!

......Hunter was down at the fuel station when the news came in so TLE called him to let him know he would be going out on a rescue just as the light had gone out of the sky.  He and Kyle were on their way in about 15 minutes.  To add to the difficulty the tracker in the unit was not transmitting, so the customer took a picture of the area he was in, and we were able to extract the co-ordinates of his location from the picture, which gave us some help.  While Hunter and Kyle were searching the dark reaches of the BLM land between us and the Bat Caves the lone driver managed to utilize the onboard winch of the General attached to a nearby boulder to put it back on its tires, and he then began the long, slow drive back to the park.  In the mean time Hunter and Kyle had still not found him.  By the time he returned, uninjured, thankfully, the boys were almost to the bat caves looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.  We were able to contact them with the news, and they began their drive back to the park.  Fortunately, the roll over was a very low speed affair, and in soft sand, so the damage to the unit was strictly cosmetic, at least it appeared to be in the darkness that enveloped our staging area.  We'll know more Sunday when I take it over to wash it, and assess the damage more completely with Hunter and Kyle.

The best possible outcome for a roll over....very minor, cosmetic damage...nothing broken, just scratches

We didn't finish closing the office until almost 6:30 pm...that was a long, long day.  Thankfully, nothing terrible happened, and it looks like the General repair will not be too extensive!

Thanks for stopping by!