Yuma

This is a geocaching article, so if you're not interested in that silly hobby of mine, you can stop reading now. I won't be offended in the least. It's been almost a month since the Yuma Mega Event at the beginning of last month and I really need to write about it.

The Yuma Mega Event is hosted each year by the South Western Arizona Geocachers (S*W*A*G). This was the 17th annual and the first one I've been able to attend. It's never fallen on a good weekend to go and half the fun is getting there and driving home and all of the caching that you do on the three or four or five days, depending upon how long you stay. This time, we left early Friday morning and got home late in the afternoon on Sunday.

A synopsis of the weekend would be as follows:  We did a lot of caching, and I do mean, a lot. There are events happening all weekend and because the S*W*A*G group has been doing this for awhile, it's a pretty well oiled machine with regards to organization. New caches popped up all weekend, giving many people opportunities for first to finds, if they wanted to go that route.

We opted to just cache in the desert on the way to Yuma, stopping here and there on the east side of the Salton Sea. Once we got into Yuma, we checked out the park where the Mega Event was going to happen and also found a couple of caches that had been placed earlier in the day. There was a flash mob event later in the evening that was a lot of fun and then we started working on some of the Adventure Labs that had been placed in and around the city.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Adventure Labs, they are a new cache type that can best be described as virtual multi-caches. You need to visit an area and get information that you input into the Adventure Lab app which will score you a cache find. Because there's nothing to find, it's more like a virtual cache, but it comes in groups of five or ten places to visit, so you literally get credit for 10 cache finds if you find all of the locations from a particular Adventure Lab. In the second photo, we were looking for a particular Adventure Lab Location. The Adventure Labs kept us busy until nightfall and then we found a great Mexican restaurant and had dinner.

The next day was devoted to the Discover Yuma series where we raced around on a scavenger hunt, finding clues and new caches all in the pursuit of Discover Yuma Geocoins. We finished the Discover Yuma series around 1:30 in the afternoon, then hit the power trails out in the desert. Power trails are just that, usually dirt roads where there are caches hidden approximately every 528 feet, the minimum distance needed between geocaches. It's a great way to bump your numbers up while having fun with a group of people. And we did both. 

Another event that evening, followed by some more caching, more eating of Mexican food, finishing up the Adventure Labs which we didn't get the day before. and finally crashing for the night.

Sunday morning, it was time to head out to the Mega Event. A Mega event is one where there are at least 500 cachers attending. Lots of people, but the park was big enough and they had one more Adventure Lab in the park that it didn't appear to be that crowded, because everyone was spread out. We participated in the Poker Run. I got two pair, but nothing worth writing home about since the winning hand as a full house I believe. Geocaching venders were there, Signal the frog, the mascot for the Geocaching website was there, so I scored a location less cache for the trip as well. 

Locationless caches were all the rage back in the early days of geocaching, but they were shuttered. Locationless caches had you find something of interest that no other geocacher had already found. For example, one location less cache I found was about Presidential Statues. I "found" the statue of William McKinley in downtown Arcata, California. Once I found it, that meant that no one else could find that particular Presidential statue. Other geocachers would have to find their own. I liked location less caches because it made me more aware of my environment. I kept a half a dozen location less caches in the back of my mind. Once I found one, I'd add another one to the mix. All in all, I found 25 before they were shuttered. Because geocaching is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, they brought back the location less for this year. Signal was going to be at several Mega Events all around the world and all you had to do was get a photo of you with him to get credit for a find. And so I did. As of this moment, Signal has been logged 3724 times. I'm sure that by the time I publish this article, that number might be larger.

The event went on all morning and afternoon, but once we'd accomplished what we came to do, we decided that we wanted to beat the traffic out of town and headed for home, caching obviously on the way home. 

I'd heard stories of what a good time everyone had and I definitely wasn't disappointed with great expectations. It lived up to everything it had been billed by some of my friends and it's something I'm looking forward to going to again next year. There's literally so much to do out here that you could spend a week participating in everything and just scratch the surface. I think I actually need to go back there at a different time, perhaps in November when it cools down after summer and just cache in the some of the areas to the east of town. I've signed a challenge cache that wants me to find 1000 caches in two different states. Most of my 16,000+ finds are in California. This area could get me up to 1000 finds in Arizona very quickly.