That's sad news indeed. I met Jayne via the Forum about the time I took a mid-life break from mid-1999 to 2000.
Jayne joined the Forum in 1998 when she started thinking about quitting her job, selling her house and using part of the proceeds to buy an RV. She was an Army veteran and had worked several years for the Washington State Department of Labor and Industry in Olympia.
We started corresponding and just before the 1999 Quartzsite Rally, she decided to visit Quartzsite to see what desert boondocking was all about. I was there on my own vacation, so I met her at the Phoenix airport and drove her out to Quartzsite for the Rally.
After the Rally I took her back to Phoenix and she flew back to WA. I went back to work in San Francisco.
That summer I decided to take a mid-life break. I was 46 years old and would travel in my RV until I ran out of money, then find another job and return to work.
Meanwhile, Jayne sold her house and bought her RV - a used Ford pickup towing an older 27 ft. Collins 5th wheel. Collins later became Alpenlite. When the Collins started falling apart, she traded it in for a new Arctic Fox 26x trailer.
After the house sale, Jayne made arrangements to park her RV on a friend's ranch south of Olympia for a couple of months while she wrapped up her work projects.
She set up her 5th wheel in the side yard of an old mobile home that had belonged to her friend's late mother. It supplied full hookups and use of a washer/dryer inside the mobile home. Water came from a yard spigot connected to the ranch well, electricity was tapped out of the mobile home's power panel and the sewer connection was a Macerator pump feeding about 50 ft. of garden hose to a septic cleanout under the mobile home's porch.
I went up to WA state that fall and wound up staying next door to Jayne, sharing the utilities and the rent.
There was a paddock and a small barn with several horses across the way. Jayne's friend and her husband lived another 100 yards down the road. The main north-south railroad tracks out of the Seattle area ran along the edge of the property, about 100 ft. from the mobile home. The tracks were elevated on a dirt causeway as they crossed the valley so they were about 50 ft. above us and you looked up at the trains as they went by. One day we were out in the yard as the Ringling Bros. circus train passed by. It was a warm day and a lot of the people were hanging out of the rail car doors getting some fresh air. We waved to them and they all waved back.
While we were there I helped her get her 5th wheel set up for boondocking. She left her job in December and we caravaned from Olympia to Quartzsite.
We stayed at the RV Forum rally site from late December 1999 to early March 2000 along with several other Forum members and watched Quartzsite grow from practically nothing to full bloom during the Big Tent week, then shrink back to nothing again.
Jan and Jean Hart were our neighbors and Wally and Helaine Hepworth showed up for a while. Terry and Betty Brewer had just purchased their Country Coach motorhome and they had to keep it out of California for 90 days (I think) to avoid paying the sales tax. They brought the motorhome to the site and Terry stayed there the whole time. Betty was still working in L.A., so she drove out on weekends, then returned to L.A. during the week.
Leaving Quartzsite, Jayne and I went our separate ways. I had run out of money so it was time to head back to Northern California and go back to work.
Jayne went spent the summer in the Prescott area and she almost got caught when a fast moving wildfire burned through the campground where she was staying. She lost her cat when it bolted during the excitement and she almost lost her whole rig, getting it out just ahead of the flames.
Later she bought some rural property near the Zuni Indian reservation south of Gallup, NM and settled there, thus the ZuniJayne handle when she returned to the Forum. I was never there, but I heard it was dry land down a dirt road, about 20 miles from the nearest town. Her little Honda generator supplied her electricity and she hauled all of her water from a spigot in town out to the property.
Rest In Peace, Jayne.