Dome Rock

Down time. I recently had the amazing opportunity to visit and stay in the beautiful city of Blythe, CA. Never heard of it? Neither had I until there happened to be an architectural project located there.

If you don't know where Blythe is, let me give you a little insight. Located in the middle of nowhere about 2 hours outside of Palm Springs, and 3 hours away from Phoenix, AZ it lies on the border of California and Arizona…a desert. That's where I was stranded for 3 days! From what I'd heard about Blythe, it usually is a truck stop for truckers or a pit stop to get gas before one heads into the outskirts of Arizona. Blythe was my destination!

The shoot had been postponed due to an unpredictability of low cloud cover and the early Wednesday school schedule that would have deprived our shoot of all the little kids that needed to be in our photographs. What do to in Blythe, CA? There is a really cool diner, some geoglyphs (whatever those are), and a movie theater…that was out of business.

I would have to say with 20,000 people living in Blythe, the only thing to do is drive aimlessly into Arizona and explore the desert. What's great about not knowing where you're going or doing, you always find interesting and creative adventures.

Ours was rock climbing!l We climbed Dome Rock to the very top to see the mountainous and desert terrain. Running into cacti and dodging rattle snakes weren't the only high points of the climb. Stumbling into a desert tortoise, finding a very deep man-made tunnel, and climbing steep rock to get to the peak made our trip out to Blythe worthwhile.

(Dome Rock, Quartzsite, AZ)

(Sagurao Cactus, Dome Rock, Quartzsite, AZ)