Lake Havasu And The Colorado Desert

 

Hiking up a dry wash near Lake Havasu.

The Colorado Desert isn't in the State of Colorado, but instead runs along either side of the Colorado River downstream of the Grand Canyon along the Arizona-California border. I drove through it a couple of times before but never stopped to check it out until this year.

It's a study in contrast, the cool, flowing river contrasting with one of the driest, hottest deserts in the world. Excepting a narrow belt of greenery along the river, the desert is similar to what I saw in Death Valley a few years ago.

The London Bridge in Lake Havasu City. The channel is artificial. The bridge exterior is original. These cut stones looked upon Queen Victoria, Charles Dickens, and Winston Churchill.

After the construction of Lake Havasu, a reservoir on the Colorado, an entrepreneur bought up a bunch of land to create a resort and retirement community. To drive interest, he purchased the old London Bridge¹ in 1968 and moved it to Arizona. It worked perfectly and he made millions. As my sister said, it's one of the most "only in America" things ever. The community is now Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

Usually if you say someone has a bridge to sell you it means you are gullible. But in this case he bought the bridge and it paid off.

People are weird.

I actually enjoyed visiting the bridge although the strangeness of it is unavoidable, with palm trees lining the banks of the artificial channel. 

This ledge is about 3 to 4 feet high. I decided to jump down rather than climb down. Not one of my better decisions.

The next day I did a nice hike down a slot canyon in nearby Cattail Cove State Park. Unfortunately I forgot that I'm not twenty years old anymore and injured myself jumping off a ledge. I was too impatient to climb down and the landing was sandy so I went for it. I mashed my right heel and felt the disks in my lower back compress, something I don't think I've ever felt before.

The slot.

It seems I spend as much time injured as healthy in recent years. I limped the next two and half miles back to my car. This caused me to cancel my planned bicycle ride. In retrospect it was a somewhat dangerous situation, being down in a slot canyon alone with little or no cell signal, and I know I should exercise better judgment in the future. I'd brought my kayak but it was too windy and choppy to paddle, with whitecap  rollers crashing into the lakeshore cliffs.

Maybe some other time.

Lake Havasu on the Colorado River. This small beach is reachable only by single track trail.

Footnotes

1 Robert P. McCulloch actually only bought the exterior granite cladding of the bridge, originally constructed in 1830. They numbered each block as the bridge was disassembled. The contractor built a modern (1960s) interior structure to spec then put the cladding around it in the original state. It's absolute walnuts!