Doug Peacock was one of Abbey's oldest friends. "Hayduke" in The Monkey Wrench Gang. Peacock alludes to Abbey being buried in the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge - it's a rough Sonoran Desert location that probably only has drug smuggling and human trafficking cross over it now. Even in the early 1980s there were sensors all along the border so Wildlife Refuge staff were regularly met by the Border Patrol.

Abbey walked the route of the Camino del Diablo, the Road of the Devil, at least once. It went from Quitobaquito oasis in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the east right at the border over to Yuma, and was a route followed by California gold Forty-niners. He walked into the visitor center at Organ Pipe and just announced that he'd walked it and was looking to make a call for someone to come get him.

There used to be an old mining town in there, complete with an opera house. I toured the refuge one day with another ORPI park ranger and with a wildlife refuge officer friend. He zigged and zagged across the refuge to show us those places and there wasn't another human to be seen. You get into the refuge from a few dirt roads across adjoining lands, and the refuge does nothing to maintain the routes that people follow once you're in there, though decades ago there were roads constructed (as such - a bulldozer cleared a path).

Anyone looking for his grave will have to have a couple of conspicuous landmarks - there are mountains, there are gulleys, there are ruins along the way. Old mining sites. It can be done, but not without a lot of difficulty.