“Tangled up in barbed wire love…”
We love our desert landscape and all the wild critters we encounter: burros, big horn sheep, tortoises and reptiles, javelinas, deer, birds of all sizes and even herds of wild horses. We love jeeping and hiking around our little desert as often as possible. We also love rock hounding and taking loads of photos.
Sometimes we love scavenging. We scour the desert wilderness for raw materials, always being careful not to disturb wild nests or habitat. From rusty old metal to rare minerals, we only gather what we find lying on the ground. We especially collect all usable old cans and metal as a raw material for our studio crafts. We get wonderful unique materials and we clean up the desert at the same time. It’s typical for us to rattle our way back home with 2-3 trash bags full of cans and other junk tied to our roof rack.
Topographic maps show us where to find old mining camps, frontier homesteads and ghost towns. Abandoned sites are particularly interesting and even dangerous (watch your step!). You never know what remains of the Old West you’ll discover. Territorial ranchers left rolls of old barbed wire, hardware and interesting litter. There were no services or established dump sites. All of the trash that didn’t rot is still scattered around wherever humans camped. We commonly find old pottery shards, depression glass and endless rusty steel cans. Metal, glass and ceramic bits strewn about every campsite. Miners also left behind open, unmarked mines that have become overgrown. Some are just holes in the ground! Skittering and slithering reptiles are also abundant in these wilds. Situation awareness is the rule of our safaris …and there must be coffee 🙂
You support our continued desert clean-up and keep our shop running when you purchase some Barbed Wire Love in the shop section of this site or at our Etsy Shop ♥♥♥
