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.