Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge 10/25/22

After leaving Rio Grande del Norte, I went south…ever south, fleeing into the sun. I wound up in Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, where you get wonderful views of Baboquivari peak, as you can see below.

Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge is busy. I guess I should say it’s set up for busyness as opposed to being actually busy, since I saw zero other campers there. Okay, maybe there was one on the way to the visitor’s center, but they weren’t anywhere close to my campsite. However, there are loads of sites and they are all numbered, so I figure there must be a lot of people there at some point. I camped there a few years before this trip and saw no one then, either, except for a group with rifles motoring around in a 4-wheeler while I was out walking.

If you have a big-rig, the sites at BANWR will accommodate you nicely. However, the first time I drove in, the paved portion of the road (Arivaca road, if I remember correctly) was so terrible that I was limping along at a blistering 5 or 6 mph in the rig I had back then, a 28 foot motor home. I’ve been on many unpaved roads that were better. I thought I’d never reach the camping area. This time around the road was smooth and lovely…ironic, as I was in a 4WD truck with my small, weird, homemade camper perched atop it and could have handled the bad road much more easily.

Mountain views aside, BANWR is basically a lot of flat scrub, as you can see. No towering saguaros, just lots of mesquite and acacia. But it’s late October, and look at the sun! In northern Idaho, you don’t get a lot of sun in late October.