Geocaching in Colorado!

After taking a two month hiatus, I'm back at it out west!

I tagged along with my hubby to Colorado Springs, Colorado from March 9th-13th, for a get away and a trip down Memory Lane. If you read my other blog, you know that I love to do that!

My travels took me to where I sit at this moment, in my room on the 7th floor of the West Tower inside the beautiful Broadmoor Hotel. I've spent the last two days visiting with Katie, my friend first and cousin second, who lives outside of Denver, about an hour north of here. Also in the area is another old class mate, Tom, and tonight I'll be meeting a grade school friend, Erika. (All rediscovered thanks to Facebook!) I am so thankful to my husband for letting me come and abandoning him on his birthday (March 11). I couldn't pass up the chance to get some geocaching done this far west!

I know I won't finish this blog until I return to Ohio tomorrow. I am waiting for Katie's arrival for lunch with Tim and I and then the two of us are going out to find some more cache's. She and her kids went with me yesterday, but before I talk about that, I'll begin with the high altitude hunting I did alone this past Tuesday.

I actually planned on heading out earlier that morning, but I, um, had a bit too much wine at dinner the night before and woke with a pounding head and could not face the sunshine outside my thankfully thick curtained window. Finally I was able to climb into the shower and set out.

Before leaving my house back in Ohio, I researched some cache sites on the geocaching.com website. I saved ten locations to my handheld GPS that are within two miles of the hotel. Once here my Magellan unit, which I call Ferdie for Ferdinand Magellan the explorer, listed the caches I had saved by which ones were nearest to my current location. Once inside my rental car, which a curteous valet attendant brought to me warm and ready (it was only in the high 30's the entire week we were here), I hooked up Richard and entered into him the lattitude and longitude coordinates I had saved in Ferdie.

The cache nearest to me was dedicated to the memory of two family dogs. It was off a walking path that started along the fence line behind an elementary school. I parked the car and on the dashboard I put the laminated geocaching information card my sister Tiffany created for her cache adventuring sisters. It lets people know that this unfamilar car, possibly parked in an odd place or way, belongs to someone who is geocaching and will be back soon.

I headed off excited to find my first cache in another state besides Michigan, a place that, except for the current temperature, by sight you'd think I was in the desert. The ground was a red, crushed dirt, dry and crunchy beneath my sneakers. What trees I saw looked sickly or dead and shrubs were short, scraggily looking things. I didn't research what type of warm or cold blooded creatures I would find here, but the caches I had researched weren't far off well used trails and I didn't plan on reaching my hand into any holes!

It was a bit windy but the sun kept me comfortable until the walking made me take off my coat as I followed the trail along the fence line and then turned left when the trail split, as the cache creator had said. From what I could see in front of me, I'd probably be looking among the dried up trees ahead to my left. On the right were mostly those bushes I mentioned, out in the open and going up hill. Not some where I'd hide a cache....

As I got closer to the first grouping of trees the trail went up a slight hill and then curved to the left. I hadn't been walking very long and the incline wasn't even as steep as a setting on my treadmill back home, but I had to stop at the top and take a breather. I was gasping and panting and thinking I was WAY more out of shape then I thought, even though I've been excercising at least three times a week! Then I remembered the elevation of the Colorado city I was exploring is just over 6,000 feet! Ugh. I continued on, glancing at my handheld until I just about reached my cache marker. Then I switched Ferdie to the coordinates screen and lined myself up to whatever line I was closest to, and then found the other line. As I walked that course I kept my eyes out for Muggles, none, and spotted ahead of me two clumps of trees, both with dead leaves and tree limbs scattered and caught at the bases. The closest one to me was the largest and Ferdie was telling me that this was the place! I exchanged it for my digital camera and bent down closer. I know what to look for now and believed that behind a pile of dried up sticks would be my first Colorado cache. And it was! The treasures inside weren't all that impressive, although there was an audio CD of an unfamiliar children's book. I was just thrilled that I found a cache in another state and would be able to log it at geocaching.com!

The way back always goes faster than when you take that first step on your path. Before I knew it, I was back at my rental car and had sent text messages to my caching sisters and actually spoke with one of them. Then I was toucing Richard's screen and entering the coordinates to my next Colorado cache!

Thanks to my completely avoidable but wanted to do it anyway delay that morning, I only had about another hour for this next cache before heading to Denver and meeting up with a friend I hadn't seen in 10 years. Richard led me to a parking lot at a trail head that was a little confusing. There was a sign that said this was such and such trail, before it was a pasture for horses, etc., etc., but then a sign right behind it said, No Entrance. I looked around but found no other recognizable path into the trees, so I did enter and found that just to the right was a garage and to the left was the trail.

Finally on my way, I picked up the pace and huffed and puffed along to another sign at a perimeter fence with the words, Do Not Enter. This is your water supply. Report any suspicious behavior. The trail I was following was above and up against the sides of the fence and probably continued all the way around it, but I knew I would be stopping about half a mile on the trail. I didn't have time to go all the way around, and since I didn't know how long it was or where it ended, I didn't want to!

I saw a few other people on foot and on moutain bike. As Ferdie got me closer and closer to the coordinates, I looked around and saw no one in sight. According to Ferdie I had to go off the trail and climb up into the trees. I could see rocks up there and the hint for this cache was, Under the big white rock. I have learned that cache hiders don't usually go too far off the trail, that I doubt when this cache was hidden, the person climbed this rocky hill to hide it. Maybe, but doubtful, and when I arrived at the top of where Ferdie said I should be going, yup, there was another path!

I knew I was close and pocketed Ferdie and pulled out my digital camera as I focused on the biggest white rock in the area. I didn't look at the lake in the distance, nor at the tree line behind me. I wanted that cache and prepared to step down a bit closer to the rock. My excitement grew even more when I saw a pen! There was a pen down by the rock, a pen probably used to sign the log book!!

I placed my feet carefully; I didn't need to be calling Tim out of what he came to Colorado Springs for to come get me off a mountain because I broke my leg! My sister, Karyn, was concerned when I called her after finding my first western cache. She didn't think I should be caching alone there...hindsight and all that, she was probably right! My hubby doesn't much care for it, Hunter wasn't here, and I wanted some CO caches!

Anyway - I made it down to that rock and I looked around and under it, but there was no sign of a hidden box. All I could see was mice droppings and there was no way I was reaching my hand under a rock! I looked around myself, but saw no other potential locations. I pulled out Ferdie and looked at him. Darn! I was way off! This rock, although white and the biggest, wasn't the one I sought. Shoot! I climbed back up and got myself stabbed by a stick in the wrist for my effort. I let Ferdi reorintate himself and after a little back and forth action, I discovered I had passed the point I needed to be and there was indeed another big white rock. And gosh darn it all, I didn't have to climb among small trees and sharp branches to reach it!

As I approached it, I could see what could be the hiding spot, a wall of smaller rocks piled along the bottom half of the larger stone. I squatted down and took away one rock...and heard a cell phone ring below me!

A hiker on the path I had climbed away from had stopped and was talking just below me. I was at the point of my discovery where you don't want to be discovered yourself! I hunkered down and waited him out. Why can't he walk and talk at the same time?? Finally he said his goodbyes and carried on. I also continued what I was doing, which was take a picture of the cache behind it's rock wall before pulling it all the way out. Once again the find was more exciting than the swag inside, so I just signed the name Hunter and I have been using and put the plastic container back the way I found it.

On my way back down Katie called me to see if I was on my way yet. My find took about 20 minutes longer than planned, but I was soon on my way to see her after too many years!

On Wednesday, I returned to Katie's house. I hadn't planned on geocaching with her, but when our dinner plans were changed and we couldn't decide on what to do, Katie suggested I tell her and her three kids, Martin, Taylor and Rae what geocaching was all about. I agreed and used their lap top to bring up geocaching.com. They told me their zip code and I was soon looking at all they could find within just two miles of their house. I found two placed by the same person and in the same park we could try.

We call climbed into Katie's Jeep and I used the suction cup to secure Richard to her windshield. While still inside I had entered the coordinates manually into Ferdie (I hadn't brought my cord with me) and read out loud the cache information, including any hints. If I had my cord I could have downloaded all the information and go paperless. I also quickly read through the first page of logs to see if there was anything in there we needed to know.

When I said aloud the name of the cache, Taylor immediately knew where Richard would take us. Apparently there is a recreation park nearby that shares its name with the two caches we'd be searching for. Even though Katie knew where she was going, I still entered the coordinates into Richard and explained to the three interested kids in the back seat just what I was doing and why. Richard took us a way Katie wouldn't have chosen, but we arrived at the recreation park and left the Jeep not far away from the skate board ramps, which the cache owner had mentioned.

With Ferdie now in hand I showed all four of my new cache adventurers how to read the small screen and reminded them to act like normal, crazy kids who probably didn't need a lesson from an adult on when and how to be sneaky! I also told them how if they were to carry a garbage bag in their hands, no one would ask them what the heck they were doing in places people wouldn't normally walk. I had a bag in my rental car, but forgot to grab it.

We passed over a wooden pedestrian bridge and were passed ourselves by teenagers on skateboards that made loud, rackety noises as the small wheels of the skate boards ran over the grooves along the pieces of wood. Once on the other side we turned left (I really need to carry a compass) and found ourselves on a paved walk way inbetween two likely hiding locations. To the right was a small ravine with trees, broken branches and garbage and to the left, bare trees and ugly shrubs. This is the part of geocaching I need to work on, the lining up of the coordinates. Ferdie's first screen gets me, represented by an arrow, close to the flag, which is the cache icon. Once the arrow is on top of the cache, I switch it to my lattitude and longitude screen to get me to the right spot, then I pocket the GPS and use my eyes and the thing between my ears to finally find it. However, as Katie and her kids probably joked about later, :) , I had to back track and walk side to side to figure out what line was what and if I was going up and down (if I had a compass at that point, I MIGHT do a little less of that! LOL

I finally told them it was in the ravine and then that's when we put the clue, Second of a triple, to work. The kids knew what the clue was and before we even got to the ravine, they were running to the middle of everything in hopes of finding it! LOL When I took my first step into this ditch full of trash I'm still mad I didn't have a bag to pick up, I slid a bit and a broken tree limb went up the leg of my pants and left a good sized scrape across my shin. Katie said she got one too, but it didn't stop her from finding the cache at the base of a tree with three trunks! The kids whooped and hollared before I hushed them and said, Stealth!!

The second cache I didn't want to believe was further along the paved walkway. It headed to the road and then along side it and I couldn't understand why anyone would hide a cache that close to such a busy and loud road. We went back over the pedestrian bridge and around the other side and probably could have eventually came to the cache if there wasn't a small river to cross. I gave in and said the paved trail must come back around, and it did, but we had to walk too close for comfort to a four lane highway before our route turned back toward the trees.

The hint for this one was, Pile of rocks. There were plenty of those along the walk way for drainage and the kids were so excited to they pounced on each pile of rocks in hopes of finding the next cache that they laughed at me when I said every time that we weren't there yet! It was great to see them having a good time. Finally Ferdie said we were almost there and not far from us was a pile of rocks bigger than the ones we'd passed so far. All three kids went at it with renewed energy, going for the big rocks first before we got them to concentrate on moving a single, smaller rock at a time and looking under it. Taylor claimed the First To Find (FTF in cache talk) and we took it from the pile and back around the tree so we could see inside it without being seen from the road. In among the usual trade items was a tracking bug! This was my first find of one of those! It was the hippie van from the animated movie Cars with a hole drilled through and the TB dog tag connected by a chain through that. On the piece of paper that came with it we learned it originated in California and its goal was to travel to the east and collect as many pictures as it could. When I logged it as found later and read its web site I could see it had traveled through Mexico before coming to this cache in CO. Now it's here with me, awaiting a place in a NE Ohio cache!

The kids were bummed we didn't do another cache, but Katie tells me she has been researching this new hobby and has found some cache's on her own. Shhh! Don't tell the kids! :P

On Thursday I had planned to look for a few more caches and was pleasantly surprised when Katie said she was going to play hookey from work. She was going to come to me at the hotel and have lunch with Tim. Afterward we'd do another cache. The cache we decided on had a gadgets and gizmos theme. The original cache included an iPod, skins for it and a digital camera. Even though I doubt anything that good was in there now, finders and traders are supposed to stay with this theme. Both Katie and I were interested in what we would find. I had some batteries and Katie an iPod skin for trade.

Richard brought us to the end of a Cul de Sac in a neighborhood of beautiful houses. He said the cache was behind those houses. My TomTom can only bring me to the road closest to the cache, but, unfortunately, we can't go walking through somebody's yard!

We back tracked and parked near a trail and started our hike. We soon found ourselves on a well groomed trail of crushed red stone that seemed to go up for the longest time! We made our turns onto different trails using Ferdie. I guess I should say I made the turns and Katie had to believe I knew what I was doing (I don't think she does now!). On one long, uphill stretch we came across a pretty big piece of poo! We passed it by and continued on a path that kept getting smaller and smaller until we stopped at a point we weren't sure if we should go on because it looked like we'd be walking in someone's yard.

We decided to head back to the Jeep. Katie had to get going to her stepson's wrestling match and I had to head back and get ready to meet a grade school friend I hadn't seen in twenty years. I told Katie that before I headed out I'd take my rental back to the houses Richard brought us to and see if we missed a closer starting point to the cache. When I returned I did find a walking path not too far from the houses. I went back to the houses first and marked the spot in my handheld as a waypoint, thinking I'd be able to see it as I approached from the other side.

I parked my car and headed out. I knew I was on a different route than what Katie and I took because it made my lungs work harder than they had before and when I came around an S in the trail, I got a good scare when I came upon a mule deer in the path. The only difference I saw between this deer and the deer I'm used to back in Ohio and Michigan is the height, but that difference is impressive when you're just a few short feet away from something that looks down on you! I told the one nearest to me and then to its buddies on the other side of the trail to just stay there and continue foraging or whatever they were doing as I make my non threatening way by. At that time my sister Karyn's voice sounded in my ear tellling me it's probably not a good idea that I'm walking alone along a Colorado trail....

I made it past the mule deer. That first look at me was all the attention they sent my way and I continued on, thinking of what I would find in this cache. The owner had mentioned that he visits it often. Could he have been there recently and put something impressive in there? Might someone have left something worthy of the pink iPod skin I had in my pocket for Katie's trade? My train of thought was speeding down those tracks when the engine almost found itself in some deep doo-doo, literally. I had almost stepped in that same piece of huge waste heaped on the trail. That meant I was taking the same steps Katie and I had taken not too long ago. I knew where this would probably take me, although I also knew there was a part of the path we had turned left on but I could go straight.... Unfortunately, I was out of time. I did want to see another old friend, and she was more important than geocaching in Colorado.... Yes, she is! LOL

When I was back in my hotel room I signed into geocaching.com and logged a DNF, for Did Not Find under this Colorado cache. On the flight back to Ohio Tim said that next years conference might be held in Colorado Springs again....