Yuma, Arizona

December 05, 2009 - January 12, 2010

This winter finds us in Arizona. We first returned to Yuma. It is our third time here and so the challenge in revisiting places is to capture excitement in the familiar. Our home park this time is Hidden Cove RV Park located next to the park we were in last year.

Yuma was founded and shaped by its location near the best natural crossing on the Colorado River. Many of the Forty-Niners crossed here via a rope ferry on their way to the California gold fields. It is hard to imagine that the Colorado of today was once navigable from the Gulf of California to the mouth of the Grand Canyon making Yuma once a bustling river town. In 1915 the historic Ocean to Ocean bridge was built. It was the only vehicular bridge crossing the Colorado for 1,200 miles. During the depression years many people used this bridge to seek a better life in California. The Los Angeles police chief sent his officers to try to stop the flow at one point. Many that were stopped decided to settle here. Yuma today is an agricultural town. The Colorado River brings green relief to the mostly yellow and brown desert landscape in the form of miles of agricultural fields, lush date palm groves and remnants of citrus groves. Fields of lettuce lie next to the largest shopping mall; tractors and farm worker buses with attached Andy Gumps add to the city street traffic.

We went to the Yuma Proving Grounds to take in a special NASA exhibit on the Constellation project. The Yuma Proving Grounds still is used to test military equipment for its ability to withstand brutal summer temperatures and difficult desert terrain. The base museum tells the history of the men trained and weaponry tested here for WWII. There is a Big Guns display of all types of cannons The museum curator told us that modern cannons were designed hundreds of years prior to their becoming a reality because the technology of making steel that could withstand the cannon’s heat and power had not yet developed. We were told that some of the military equipment seen in the film AVATAR (supposedly 150 years in the future) is very close to coming to fruition. A new Holocaust section was added since our last visit. The photos and interviews of the men from this base who were the first to enter the prison camps made this section very compelling.