My Trails

Nice temperatured here.

For the last 5 days I have camped in the Prescott National Forest, five miles southwest of the city of Prescott. The campgrounds is at 6000′ of elevation, providing much cooler temperatures than the blazing heat in Yuma. It has been mid 70’s each day – just about perfect!

You can’t have beautiful sunsets every day in Arizona. Sometimes they are just normal.

The limit for camping here is 7 days. I will be moving on tomorrow, but the reason to move is not entirely based on coming up on the stay limit, it is mainly because a cold front is coming and bringing with it temperatures in the 50’s during the day and close to freezing at night.

I rode into Prescott twice since I’ve been here. One time was to Walmart and one time was to check out a free dump at the waste treatment plant. It is nice to have the convenience of a large city close by for supplies but the traffic and congestion was not pleasant to drive in. I’m not sure why the traffic was so bad but I hope my move tomorrow will be easier as I travel through town.

Other than short walks each day, I have hung out near camp most of the time, enjoying the weather, and healing a hole in my mouth where I had a tooth extracted. Even though I haven’t done anything exciting in the last few days, I wanted to post to cronicle this spot for future reference.

I have been testing my batteries with information I accumulated from the meter I got from Richard. I have kept track of amps, volts, and state of charge when fully charged, and then again after using them in the evening and overnight. By comparing battery capacity and use overnight, and analyzing percentages and voltages in the morning, it is apparent I have lost about 20% of my batteries life.

Richard and I have discussed several causes that contribute to early battery failure. Lead acid batteries don’t like to go long time-periods without being fully charged. They also don’t like to be mixed with different types and sizes. I’m afraid I’m guilty of both those infractions. But even the abuse of batteries doesn’t explain why batteries that Donna, Richard, and I, all bought at Costco, have failed early.

The good news is that Richard told me the dealer where he bought his lithium batteries is looking at importing batteries from a new supplier. That should lower the cost.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2017 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Adventure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.