Background

These are both Back Country and Rock Hounding Trips I have taken over the past several years starting around 1999. I have used a variety of vehicles and technology to complete and document these Trips. I have collected the following information for each Trip:

     A general site description indicating where to look
     Directions for getting to the location where the off-road GPS waypoints start
     Site photos to assist in find the collecting area and to show the best spots to collect
     Detail annotated topographical maps of the off-road trail.
        Overview
        Leg Overview
        Detail Legs
     GPS waypoints for the off-road part of the Trip
     Points of interest near the route of the Trip
     Trips that are in the same Region
     Photos of the raw material to be found at each site
     Photos of finished material from most sites

There are several different indexes allowing easy access to the Trips.

     Alphabetic by Trip Name
     Maps
        Google state map
        showing the trip location within Arizona
        showing the trip location within 5 Regions
        Each location is shown by a jeep symbol
        A red jeep is a Back Country Trip
        A green jeep is a Rock Trip
        A red jeep is a closed location
     Photos of the material found at the site
     Photos of the finished material found at each site
     Difficulty of the trip
     Physical ability

There are rockhounding resources:

     Arizona Rock Club Links
     Health & Survival Tips
     Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service regulations
     Rockhounding Equipment Links
     Rock Trip Code of Ethics
     Rock Identification
     Equipment recommendations
     Experience levels requirements
     Trip difficulty definitions

The following vehicles were used for these trips:

     1984 Honda XR350R
     1992 Ford F150 4X4
     2005 Frontier 4X4
     2007 Polaris Ranger 750

The technology used included:

      A Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop, replaced with a Dell M6600Laptop i7 16GB Ram, 500 Gb solidate state and 1Tb HD.

     National Geographic’s Topographic mapping software ( TOPO! 4.5.0)  including detail maps purchased for the state of Arizona.

     A Samsun Galaxy S7 edge with the Backcountry Navigator has replaced the old Garmin GPSMap 60CSx with 32GB of memory      and detail for maps loaded using the Garmin MapSource software.

    An Pentax K70 DSLR which replaced the old Olympus Camedia E-10 camera

    Adobe Photoshop used to edit the photographs

   Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 for development of the web pages

   RAM Mounts Laptop mounting hardware for the pickup and the ranger.

The topographical maps were created either using the laptop or recording the track on the Garmin/Samsung and then transferring to the mapping software on the laptop. Using the laptop mounted in the truck or the Polaris Ranger with the National Geographic’s Topographic mapping software running in track mode with the Garmin/Samsung attached and feeding live GPS info to the mapping software, this displays your current location on the screen and creates a track of your route.  The mapping software allows editing of the map to include notes, waypoints, and other formatting options.  The maps shown on the website were edited with this software and then exported into the jpg format.

The National Geographic’s mapping software was also used to create the waypoints for the off road parts of each Trip.