With the craziness of this year, Michael and I decided to take an extended holiday vacation and road-trip across the country to Florida and back, stopping along the way at various camping spots, off-road trails, National Parks and little towns.
We left our Central Arizona home in the evening, so night one of our trek only took us as far as the Arizona/New Mexico border. In truth, we planned to stop an hour closer to home, but we discovered a state prison only two miles from our original destination, so we decided to keep going a bit further. We were glad we did because not only did we discover an awesome (free) dispersed camping location on BLM land, we also learned what rockhounding is!
“Rockhounding, or amateur geology, is the recreational study and collection of rocks, gems, minerals, or fossils from their natural environments.”
– Rockhound Times
We arrived at camp pretty late at night, so we found a spot (coordinates below), popped open the tent and went to bed. When we woke up in the morning, we discovered why our home for the night was referred to as the BLM Round Mountain Rockhound Area. The ground was COVERED with agates.
We did a little rockhounding ourselves before packing up and hitting the road. While I haven’t historically been into gems, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to grab some stones for those I know who love them. I’ll probably keep a few in our home as well to commemorate this cool find on our trip.
Overall, this was a great little stop on our trip across the Southern part of the country!
The coordinates for this spot are: 32.482487, -109.061108
You don’t need four-wheel drive to get there, although the road is definitely bumpy. We only saw one other group camping nearby. Other than that, it was just us and cows moo-ing in the distance.
We’ll continue posting along our adventure across the country, so be sure to stay tuned here for more! You can also follow along on Instagram.
