Where you can go with the flow

The Colorado River has a reputation this time of year as party central. For college kids, it’s a popular spring break spot, with cheap hotels, chain restaurants and margaritas the size of babies’ heads. And for Southern Californians of any age, it’s a giant weekend water park, complete with Mardi Gras beads.

But a trip to “the river,” as most of us simply call it, is more than shotgunning Tecate cans while hanging shirtless from the bow of a rented motorboat. There are austerely beautiful landscapes. Places to chill out. Curious bits of history. (And when all is said and done, you may still want to go back to drinking Tecates.)

Much as we like to think of the river as being in our backyard, it does involve a drive -- about four hours, if you’re lucky, starting out on Interstate 10, one of the commonest routes. That will get you to the water near Blythe and your first encounter with the mighty Colorado, which isn’t all that mighty there. In fact, you may think you’re looking at a dirt road, the river being khaki-colored with silt and seemingly barely moving.

To get to where the action is, you’ve got to head north to the area around Parker, Ariz., and Lake Havasu. As you follow this route, the river widens, palm trees appear and you’ll be faced with vistas of near-tropical beauty. The Buckskin Mountains rear their craggy clay cliffs, dappled with shrubs and desert grass. You may recall De Orellana traveling up the Amazon, or perhaps Marlow going upriver in “Heart of Darkness,” depending on how you feel about the series of concrete outposts on the opposite bank.

Aside from old mining towns and Indian nations, it seems as if almost everything was built fairly recently. The 46-mile-long Lake Havasu, which straddles the Arizona border and whose Mediterranean blue jumps out like an oasis, resulted from the completion of Parker Dam in 1938, and little more than fishing villages lined its shores until the early ‘60s.

Today there are about 55,000 residents in Lake Havasu City, on the Arizona side; the population balloons with 20,000 visitors during March and early April. During the summertime, roughly three-quarters of visitors are from Southern California, according to the city’s Convention & Visitors Bureau.

The region’s image as a bastion of sun and fun has been a double-edged sword. In 1995, Lake Havasu hosted MTV’s “Spring Break” series, and an even greater influx of partying students ensued. Today the visitors bureau doesn’t market to students, instead focusing on families and snowbirds and citing such super-quiet activities as bass fishing. (Indeed, the Bassmasters tournament made a stop in November.)

“It’s not quite as decadent as people think,” bureau President and Chief Executive Dan Cunning says. “We pride ourselves on being a very family-friendly destination.”

The water

At the height of spring, the hilly shores of southern Lake Havasu City are living up to the non-sanctioned hype. Most of the daytime waterborne action among the young crowd is centered at the beach and dock at the Nautical Inn, just across the bridge from the London Bridge Resort, and in the channel that bifurcates the town.

Around noon, bleary-eyed collegians begin emerging from their rooms and congregating on the shore. Slowly but surely, like an army devoted to conquering fun, they drag out their coolers and visors and pull their boats up.

By midafternoon, the shallows of the lake and adjoining inlets are awash in stripped-down, tipsy young scholars. They hail from everywhere -- the Southwest, yes, but also from Wyoming, Massachusetts, Michigan, even Canada.

To get the full Monty, rent a covered pontoon boat and slowly steam to the middle of the lake, watching out for the 100-mph boats, of course. Pull your craft alongside the kids’, interact with these loud creatures and you’ll find they are friendly to anyone brave enough to join in. They will share their music and their customs.

“Where you from, dude!?” they’ll ask.

“Los Angeles,” you’ll tell them.

“L.A.? No way! I have a cousin there, bro!” And then they’ll throw you a beer.

A bit farther south on the California side of the lake, in a bay called Copper Canyon that is accessible only by boat, a smaller but no less enthusiastic crowd watches divers leap from the rocky cliffs. In the past, it has become jampacked with boats, so now authorities keep a vigilant eye on the area, blocking access when it gets too crowded. But add to that some Mardi Gras beads and the attendant disrobing, and it’s quite the scene.

But it’s not all craziness.

“You can go where the party is, and you can go where it’s not,” says Armin Lotz, a 35-year-old Garden Grove resident who has been going to the river since he was 18. “We normally do our own thing.... Even on Saturdays, which are kind of a zoo, you can find places to be by yourself. It’s just a lot harder than it used to be.”

For Lotz and his wife, Shindi, there’s a simple beauty in letting their boat float down the river as they soak in the alternating landscape of sheer cliffs and sandy, brush-covered beaches. Occasionally they’ll spot a deer or coyote taking a drink on the shore, or migratory birds flying overhead. (No surprise, considering Lake Havasu and Parker both have national wildlife refuges.) If it gets too hot, a quick dip in the water does the trick.

But, as river rats will tell you, be careful. Watch out for the traffic -- and the drinking. There are a lot of folks out for the first time, who have rented all manner of craft, from roaring twin-engine motorboats to houseboats to kayaks to inner tubes to semi-amphibious all-terrain vehicles.

In fact, Lotz and his friends say that for family water sports like tubing or wakeboarding, it’s best to come out during the week. Either that or stick to the bass fishing on shore.

The towns

Though the water is the most obvious draw, the surrounding towns have their quirkier assets.

Parker is a train depot with a windblown charm to it. One place you can’t miss: the cured beef hut on the corner of South California Avenue. It is painted fire-engine red, and the porch is draped with an enormous banner reading, “Daniel’s really good fresh jerky.” The owner is Daniel Fernandez, a native of Buenos Aires who moved to Parker from Los Angeles two years ago with his uncle and business partner.

“To get away,” Fernandez said, when asked why he’d moved. Many people in these parts will give you the same answer.

The Nellie E Saloon, known more colloquially as the Desert Bar, takes that escape aesthetic to an extreme. To get there, you have to take a dirt road for five miles off the main highway, which means you’d better take it very slowly or have four-wheel drive. The bar, powered by solar electricity, was built on an old mining camp. It is open only from noon to sunset on weekends, from Labor Day to Memorial Day, because the summer is just too hot for business, owner Ken Coughlin says.

Upriver, Lake Havasu City is practically a metropolis by comparison. New as it is, the town has grown up around an Old World relic: the London Bridge, which in 1968 a loopy pair of local businessmen purchased for $2.5 million and imported stone by stone from England. It is the biggest tourist draw in Arizona after the Grand Canyon -- which also happens to be along the river’s 1,450 miles.

Check out the bullet marks on the bridge’s stones; they are vestiges of Luftwaffe strafings from the London Blitz. If you luck out, you can eavesdrop on one of the busloads of English tourists, marveling at their relocated heritage. Soak in that enduring Anglo-American bonhomie.

Next door is the mock Tudor London Bridge Resort. It offers large hotel rooms at reasonable rates; has a full-size replica of the Golden State Coach, Buckingham Palace’s coronation mobile, in the lobby; and features a nightclub, Kokomo. It’s a multistory affair with strobe lights hanging from palm trees that looks like something H.G. Wells might have come up with if he’d been a producer for MTV.

The adjoining Tudor village contains the London Arms Pub & Playhouse Theatre, which is putting on “Forever Plaid” intermittently through the summer. But the best indoor entertainment option is Channel 45, Lake Havasu City’s access cable station.

It shows commercial-free old movies (“His Girl Friday” and “The Third Man” were a recent back-to-back double feature), a homegrown culinary program called “Cooking With Jim and Norris” that should not be missed (the hosts were making a meal of deviled eggs and sandwiches from leftovers one day), as well as an informative recurring documentary, “The Story of London Bridge,” which proves that Lake Havasu can creditably trace its history back to the Romans.

The trip

Some of the more fascinating stops on a river trip can be had on the way there and back. California 62 through Joshua Tree National Park is one of the great motoring stretches in all of the U.S. You’ve often wondered: Can the sight of a bunch of moribund, extraterrestrial-looking flora growing out of the sand really be such a mystical experience? The answer, as U2 once assured us, is a resounding yes.

If war and not botany is your bag, a short drive from the exit of the park is the former home of the Desert Training Center, the base that George “Old Blood and Guts” Patton set up in the early days of WWII to prep his tank battalions to meet Erwin “The Desert Fox” Rommel in the dunes of North Africa. The Gen. George S. Patton Memorial Museum at Chiriaco Summit gives a look at some nice unexploded ordnance. (Who knew Dubya Dubya Two would keep popping up out here?)

If you take a detour north of Lake Havasu, you’ll hit the town of Topock and Route 66, the beleaguered but not forgotten Main Street of America. The last weekend in April, it’s where the annual Route 66 Fun Run ends, after having begun 140 miles to the east in Seligman. The three-day trek, which attracts thousands of slightly insane people, is actually a drive, open to any street-legal vehicle from tricycles to buses.

This stretch of 66 is one of its most picturesque. All the recent rain in the Southwest has put the desert into uncommon bloom. Just south of Oatman, there is a stretch that might be called Joshua Tree Jr., where the hillsides and coombs are peppered with the jumping cholla, a fantastic-looking needly bush.

On approaching Oatman, a once-thriving gold-mine settlement that is now a thriving tourist town, you may find yourself in an inexplicable traffic jam. Sitting bewildered in your car, you will suddenly hear gunshots.

Don’t worry, this is one of the mock shootouts the local greeters put on every few hours. Your best course is to take a cue from one of the wild burros that meander around town looking for carrots and pay the faux cowboys no mind.

Instead, park and have a refresher in the dark, cool Oatman Hotel barroom, an appropriately cavernous space whose walls are papered in dollar bills. Upstairs is the suite in which Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their honeymoon in 1939. For less cramped quarters, tour the underground tunnels of the nearby Gold Road Mine. The magnificent Sitgreaves Pass is just a little bit farther to the east on U.S. 66. And on your way back over the state line, you can follow Interstate 40 by the foreboding peaks of the Mojave National Preserve.

If the river teaches us one thing, it’s to take your time. Soon enough you’ll be stuck back in freeway traffic, fielding calls from your accountant.