Road Trip!

This post is primarily dealing with geocaching, so if you're not interested, then you can probably stop reading right here. Things have settled down tremendously over the early part of the year where everything seemed to be upside down. In my last post which I published back in the early first week of August, I mentioned that one of my happy places was in planning road trips. This post is the first of several detailing the road trip I took to Colorado and Utah in the month of September.

The first two days of the trip were mostly traveling, getting to my first destination in Colorado, so it was primarily driving and taking breaks here and there for geocaching. Most of the geocaches that I wanted to find on this trip were either going to be virtual or challenge caches as those two were my primary focus. I would also be working on several challenge caches, including one that wanted me to find at least 6 different types of geocaches in 20 different counties. Since I had already done that in 19 different counties, I only needed one more, so I had a focus on Iron, Salt Lake, and Washington Counties in Utah, as well as Grand County in Colorado. My first night's stop was going to be in Cedar City, UT, located in Iron County, so that's where I figured I'd be able to complete that challenge.

I didn't end up getting what I needed in Iron County, since I couldn't find a particular cache near my motel, so I settled on other things that first night. One of the last caches that I ended up finding on the first day was a virtual cache in Cedar City that focused on the history of a fort that had been built there. In the morning I tried for a couple of other cache types nearby, but it just wasn't meant to be for Iron County and so I took off for Grand Junction, CO which would be my next stop.

Once again it was a full day's drive to get to Grand Junction, so there wasn't a lot of sight seeing involved, but mostly driving and stops to find geocaches. One of the stops that day involved a virtual cache which highlighted the first Olympic gold medal athlete of Utah, Alma Richards. I'm pretty sure that something like this probably wouldn't get approved in California, but I was surprised with this one since it took me literally onto the high school campus that Richards attended, onto the track, during the school day, while a physical education class was finishing up their running activity near the monument seen in the photo. No one said anything to me, no one questioned me as I walked on to campus. It was a little on the weird side to say the least since I'm used to schools being a little bit more security conscious when it comes to strangers walking onto any school campus. Anyway, I got the information I needed for the virtual and then quickly got off of campus and back on the road.

Another goal for the trip was to find at least one cache in each county I traveled through on the trip. This was a success as I only failed to find a cache in one county that I traveled through and ended up finding caches in 14 new counties. Yes, you guess it. I'd signed a challenge cache that wanted me to find caches in at least 200 counties. At the beginning of the trip, I was at 199, so Paiute County just off I-70 became my 200th county cached in and the first new one on the trip.

At a rest stop along I-70 was a great viewpoint called Spotted Wolf Canyon. There was a virtual cache here which I completed and then it was just a matter of stretching the legs a little bit. This particular canyon was amazing as it highlighted not only the view, but the engineering that went on to wind I-70 down through the canyon at a rather steep price back in the day. This spot also highlighted one of the main reasons why I've really come to enjoy geocaching so much. I've said it many times in the past, but it bears repeating. I probably would have missed this spot entirely were it not for geocaching. This silly little game has taken me to several spots that I never would have visited were it not for the game and that included spots in places like Yosemite Valley, that I felt I had explored extensively and there was no possible way that there would be something new to see in Yosemite. Geocaching proved me wrong there and it has continued to take me to awe inspiring and interesting places.

Finally, sometime further down the road that day, I ended up finding a traditional geocache. I actually found several traditionals during the day, but this one was intriguing in that when I signed it, about five signatures above it was another cacher's stamp who lives in the same area that I do. This is not the first time I've encountered things like this, but just the latest. The last time was when I encountered another local geocacher's name in a cache that I found in New Mexico. For the most part, geocachers love to travel, so this shouldn't be that surprising, but it's always cool to see friends' names in the log sheet that you've just signed.

That evening, I stopped in Grand Junction, CO which would be my base camp for the next three days or so. I did some caching in the area, actually bumped into a couple of local Grand Junction cachers who were looking for the same cache I was. When I'm on a road trip like this, I usually try to host an event somewhere just so I can meet the local geocachers. Grand Junction was no exception, so I asked them whether they were planning on attending my coffee event the next morning. They said they'd be there and then we ended up finding that cache, plus another cache nearby that had eluded them before. After finding that second cache, we said our goodbyes with the promise of seeing each other the next morning and I headed back to my motel to log my caches for the day and to get a good night's sleep. The next day promised to be a good sightseeing day for me as I was going to tour a nearby national monument, but I'll write about that in a future blog entry.