Exploring Kofa National Wildlife Refuge & Tire CHUNKS | e114

We explore the surrounding areas in Quartzsite (coyotes!) and something is amiss on our tires…

WHERE WE STAYED🛻⛺:

Plomosa Road BLM Camping

We stayed here for about 3 days after heading into Parker to get Gary’s prescriptions. You can see the hike and our campsite on last week’s blog/video .

Kofa National Wildlife Refuge – Palm Canyon Road

We got lucky and ended up getting a site pretty close to the mountain. What amazing sunsets we had with the mountains just glowing!

Kofa National Wildlife Refuge – Off Manganese Trail

GPS Coordinates approx: 33.48177, -113.80317

If you want to keep your rig free of pinstriping, this is NOT the path to go on! We decided to head south from C&S Tires (New Hope, AZ) on Vicksburg Road into Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, but on the east side.

This trail was fine until shortly after the larger wash. There was a site before it got too bad on the right, but we thought it was going to get better (it didn’t). We stopped about 10 minutes later and stayed the night. Beautiful evening, quiet as can be!

WHERE WE PLAYED:🐟🛶🚴‍♀️🥾

Palm Canyon Trail (Kofa National Wildlife Refuge)

This was a fun hike from our campsite to the Palm Canyon Trail. The actual trail is only 1.3 miles out and back but we didn’t want to move our camper.

Not surprisingly, the hike from the camper to the trailhead was uphill the entire time. That was actually a little harder since you were exposed to the sun the whole way. Once you get into the canyon, you’re shaded most the time which was really helpful.

View toward our camper from inside the canyon

In parts of the day, the mountains seem to glow a reddish-orange color – beautiful!

WHERE WE FIXED THE TIRES: 🛻⛺🛠

C&S Tires Inc (Salome, AZ)

Michelin XDS2 Tires – These are the tires we ended up purchasing. As of 6 months in, we’re still pretty happy!

We ended up getting our tires from this place. They had good reviews on Google, so we thought we’d take our truck in to see what’s going on with the big chunk missing.

Troy from C&S tires was pretty straight-forward. He told us the tire was fine to drive. He also said we still had enough tread on the tires do go a ways. However, after the incident with the mountain snow, Gary didn’t feel comfortable continuing on without getting more aggressive tires.

After doing some online investigation, Gary wanted to try the Michelin XDS2 tires. They seemed to be well-rated, especially in the snow.

While asking for pricing, he gave us their estimates and then while we were there, we all searched for better prices online. Based upon the speed C&S could get the tires (8am the next day), their pricing was inline with the other cheapest online alternates (Walmart was a little more expensive, Discount Tire was more expensive as well).

Derrick here did a fabulous job working on this beast. These 19.5″ tires are a PAIN!

All said and done, we ended up paying $4545 for all 6 tires plus mounting and balancing. Not a cheap venture. We know others use Toyo tires, which we may try next time if we don’t like these (or can’t swallow the cost in a few years).