Weekend attendees gather around one of the borate crystals at the visitor's center during their tour.

The Hi-Desert Rig Runners returned to their roots on the northern fringe of the Mojave Desert at the Sierra Trails RV Park located near the historical town of Mojave, CA for their March campout. It turned out to be a wild St. Patrick Day's week-end with wild weather, good company, good sight seeing, good food, and good entertainment (plenty of wild poker). Our hosts Harold and Norma Miller are to be commended for all their excellent hard work. Seven rigs, including one guest, were there throughout the weekend. A WIT member from Washing Stat returning home stopped for the night and was invited to Friday's evening meal. Susan and Phil Jaffe were an affable couple traveling in a new Vectra no less. Our President, who lives in California City, his wife and his sister who was visiting from Maryland also, attended all functions. Our guests were Ralph and Ester Carroll from Hisperia.

A trip was made on Friday to the Borate open pit mine. At the visitor center we could view the largest open pit mine in California where they are extracting borate ore from one of the world's largest deposits. The deposit contains both sodium and calcium borates. Since it is much cheaper to process the sodium borate, the calcium borate is being stockpiled for some inte in the future when it may become feasible to process it. The pit is so large that the huge trucks used to haul material out look like toys. However, these toys haul around 165 tons of material. It takes about three scoops from a huge shovel just to load one truck which is done in about one and a half minutes. The visitor center is an excellent facility to view the open pit mine and get an explanation of the processing facility also.

Gathered in front of a replica of one of the Twenty Multe Team Borax Trains.

Later we drove into the town of Boron and visited the Boron Museum. The Museum has an excellent collection of historical artifacts and pictures of the area.

Doing what we do best: eating!

Returning to camp that evening we had what else? Corned beef and cabbage in honor of St. Patrick. The hostess and her helpers did a tremendous job and a true Irish meal was had by all. Later a really wild game of poker for the wild bunch took up the remainder of the evening.

On Saturday after our business meeting, our President invited the group to his new home in California City. The Athy's have a lovely new home with room to park the motorhome alongside with full hookups. Barbara even has a special room for her extensive doll collection. While there we just had to have a friendly little poker game with Wally, David's Dad, who lives with them. Others in the group enjoyed a game of spinner.

Back at camp for dinner we enjoyed another very good potluck meal. This time the predominate theme seemed to be pasta. Lorraine Brockway and Tryna Morton both prepared pasta dishes which were at least a five star rating. Needless to say we do have some good cooks and as usual we do not go away hungry.

Sunday the weather reports indicated all roads open and clear. So another wonderful campout came to an end.