I had a bit of time to kill today so figured I drive around Q to try and get a feel for the area. First up was to drive north of town on Highway 95. First stop was the Hi Jolly BLM camping area. This is another area where there is 14 days of free camping. It's boondocking at it's finest as it is with the other BLM camping areas. Hi Jolly was already pretty pretty busy but this area is fairly small and is only a couple miles out of Quartzsite so it attracts a lot of people. See the pictures of Hi Jolly below.
I then went a few further north and took a look at the Plomosa Road BLM camping area. This is a larger area then Hi Jolly and it has a lot of large flat places to carve out your own campsite from. There is a paved road that goes through the middle of the BLM land so it is easy to get to your selected camping area. While there are more total number of rigs here already, the area is so much bigger they are spaced much further apart. See a few pictures below of the Plomosa Road BLM area below.
I turned around and headed back into town. On my drive around the area I saw about a dozen RV parks, a half dozen RV dealers, MickyD's, Burger King, Carl Jr's plus a few local eateries along with a few grocery and hardware stores. Pretty typical of any small town. The real difference from most small towns are the huge number vendors setup all over selling everything from RV parts to clothes. Of course there are also a large number of stone and gem dealers thrown in the mix. I would guess there are over a thousand vendors in all.
I decided to stop in the Tyson Wells area to check out some of the vendor's wares. Walking up and down the isles I found cheap tools (reminds me of Harbor Freight), nuts & bolts by the pound, jewelery, health food, custom signs and even carnival food. There is even a couple of open air bars. And this is not even in full swing yet, that will not happen until the last week of January! Below is a couple of pictures of the vendors on each side of the street.
The Tyson Wells area got it name from Charles Tyson who build a fort in 1856 on what is now Quartzsite. He built the fort (named Fort Tyson) to protect the water well from the Indians. Tyson's Wells became a stage coach stop. Later the stage coach lines disappeared and Tyson's Wells were abandoned. In the late 19th century the mining boom caused an expansion and Tyson's Wells had a few stores and a couple of saloons. Because of the boom the town was going to be renamed Quartzite due to the large deposits in the area. But when the post office was opened they misspelled it Quartzsite (notice the S) and that is how the town got it's present name.