If you find the name Earp familiar, you are likely thinking of Wyatt Earp, the Old West lawman of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral fame. I'm talking about Earp, CA, a vestige of a town in southeastern California not far across the Colorado River from Parker, AZ. There is a connection, as the town was renamed for the man in 1929, the year he died. Per the Wikipedia entry for Earp, the town (see link above),
The town, originally named Drennan in 1910, was renamed Earp in 1929. It was named for famed Old West lawman Wyatt Earp who with his common-law wife, Josephine Sarah Marcus, lived part-time in the area beginning in 1906.
We camped here for the night on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land on our way from Scottsdale to Las Vegas. It was our second boondocking experience, after Pine Springs. It didn't cost anything, which was welcome. As with Pine Springs, Earp was another map dot that defied expectations. It can be daunting for newbies to pull off the road (not too far ... yet) in the middle of the desert and stay overnight with no connections and, perhaps, no cell service. That is, until you actually do it. We very much enjoyed our brief stay here. Milo certainly made himself comfortable.
There was something liberating about neither having to check-in, nor check-out. Our only constraint was that we did have a check-in time in Las Vegas the following day. Nonetheless, we enjoyed the feeling while it lasted. I'm sure we'll be doing this again.
The photo below implies utter seclusion. This, however, is merely deception from artistic license. If you turned around 180 degrees, you would see an intersection of two roads, U.S. highway 95 and California state route 62. At the junction was a California agricultural inspection station and a bit of commercial truck traffic. We were a little concerned that the inspectors would confiscate the bounty of citrus my cousin bestowed upon us in Scottsdale. Happily, they didn't.
One last note. The location of the BLM site was technically Vidal Junction, not Earp. But it's close enough for artistic license again, purely to add a nugget of interest. After all, who has ever heard of Vidal Junction? I feel historically vindicated, though. If you read further in the Wikipedia entry on Earp, CA, you'll see that Wyatt Earp and his common-law wife did have a cottage in Vidal, where they spent the autumns, winters, and springs of 1925–1928. Let's just call it the Earpland region.