Exploration

It's the beginning of the month and although it's a little late, it's time for P.J.'s photo blogging challenge for the month of February. The theme this past month was Exploration. After looking at my photos that I took last month, the explore theme fell right into my lap and the tough part was picking the photos that I wanted to represent each exploration, but I narrowed them down to five and so here we go.  This is my take on the theme Exploration.

First off, I want everyone to know right now that most of this post will be about geocaching, so if you're not interested in geocaching, then feel free to stop at this point in time. All of the photos for this month's theme dealt with geocaching in one form or another, sort of.

1. Exploring Geology

The first weekend in February I took a road trip to southwestern Arizona, most particularly, Yuma, Arizona. The geocaching group down there hosts a large event on the Sunday and there's all sorts of things happening the entire weekend. One of the things I like to do when I'm on a road trip is to get as many different icons (geocaching types) as possible. One of the types that I found that weekend were five earth caches, where you learn about a geologic phenomenon of some kind, then answer some questions regarding what you've seen.

This particular earth cache is located just north of the town square in Yuma. We actually had a little time to kill before heading down to the town square for a flash mob event, so we stopped off here to study the rock and answer the questions put to us on the cache page. Most geologists that I know always carry a coin in their pockets so they can use it as a reference marker for grain size of a particular rock, hence the photo of the quarter on this rock. We ended up finding five different earth caches that weekend, not a large total, but it was enough for us with all of the other things that we explored that weekend.

2. Exploring History

One of the newer types of geocaches are the Adventures. They are kind of a cross between a multi cache and a virtual cache. We did quite a few Adventures on our way down to Yuma, mainly because it was raining all the way down there and the Adventures tend to work better, because you're looking for information, as opposed to an actual container and so you can usually get the answer much more quickly.

However, several of the Adventures that we'd chosen to do that day were quite moving and we ended up getting pretty wet in the process. One Adventure in Cathedral City had a stop at a Cancer Survivor's Park, which, for obvious reasons, was quite emotional for me. I chose not to post a photo for that one, mainly because I didn't feel a got any really good photos and so I opted to post this second photo instead.

This Adventure was in Palm Desert and explored a huge park in the city. One of the stops along the Adventure was the Desert Holocaust Memorial. This particular sculpture was right in the middle of the spot and I felt the sculptor caught the essence of the tragedy of this event. I hope I was able to convey with my photo what I felt the sculptor had already done.

3 & 4. Exploring Food

In our local geocaching community, I have a reputation of liking my food and I also have a reputation that when I say I'm hungry, that's usually the signal that we need to stop very soon and find a place to eat, otherwise "Webfoot" is going to get hangry. And hangry Webfoot is not a pleasant individual to be around. On this trip, I don't think I ever had to worry about being hangry, or even hungry because we ate well.

We were in the Palm Springs area on the first day and my daughter, when she heard that we were going to be going through Palm Springs, recommended Sherman's Deli and Bakery. The menu was extensive and I eventually settled on Sherman's Philly, with brisket, peppers, onions and provolone. Then of course, I almost had buyer's regret when I saw the man at the next table get served his Reuben sandwich. Man, that looked good, but once my sandwich came, I was all in. I guess what this really means is I need to go back there again to try the Reuben. Yeah, I can do that.

We had an asian buffet later that weekend and the last night we were there, we had fantastic Mexican food at this place that used to serve up from a Taco truck, but in the past year or so have found a brick and mortar building to serve great food. After we finished there, I mentioned that we really needed to go get some ice cream and so we ended up driving up to Mooos Creamery.

The wait was a little long, but the ice cream was worth the wait. My friend Kami had already decided when we walked into the place that she was going to sit on the ice cream bench as opposed to a booth, and so that's why we ended up there.The place had so many choices, that this is one of those places where you're going to have to go back more than once to really enjoy yourself. I had two different flavors and I could have probably chosen six or seven different ones; they all looked so good. Once we were totally satiated with that, as always, we checked our geocaching apps and realized there was a geocache right behind the building, so we walked out and around to the back of the building to score one more find before the night was done.

5. Exploring Geography

If you don't already know it, then I should tell you that I majored in Geography in college. I ended up taking a physical geography course while in community college and I was off and running from there. I'd found a subject that really interested me and I took more and more courses there and when I transferred to Humboldt State University, I continued to take courses in Geography pursuant to my degree.

I can honestly say that most of my hobbies revolve around geography in some way or another. I discovered Where's George? the dollar bill tracking web site. You enter your dollar bills, mark them in some way telling people to come to the website and then you spend your money in the hope that it will show up again. This hobby led me to Geocaching and although I still find Where's George? interesting, it's more of a passive type of hobby since you can't really control where your bills go.

Geocaching, on the other hand, you control what you do.  You want to go on a road trip to find geocaches? Go for it. You want to find urban micros? Go for it. I guess the point I'm trying to make is you can decide how your geocaching hobby works for you and that's why I like it so much more so than Where's George? I think that I like geocaching so much more because it involves all sorts of the different types of geography that I studied when I was in college, physical, historical, political, and many others.

Geography in general is a combination of different fields that sort of overlap. For instance in this last photo, we can see the physical geography of an area, what the lay of the land is doing and how those mountains in the background might be influenced by the river that you can't quite see behind me (that's an irrigation canal directly behind me). You can also see the political and human implications if you explore more deeply into this photo. I found this photo interesting from that point of view. Here I am, exploring my hobby of geocaching in Arizona, with California over my left shoulder and Mexico over my right shoulder.

And there you have it, my interpretation of the theme for this month Exploration. Please feel free to stop by P.J.'s blog and see how he and others interpreted the same theme. Please feel to comment here. I promise, I won't bite.

My First Full Day in Colorado

This is a continuation of my post from last week chronicling my road trip to Colorado and Utah. I pretty much took enough photos for each day, so from here on out, each day will be a different blog post to cover the entire road trip.

Usually, when I road trip and the day is primarily going to be sightseeing, it will still encompass some kind of geocaching, either earth caches or virtual caches and this was no exception. That third day, I woke up and headed off to a meet and greet coffee event that I was hosting in Grand Junction. I'd met two people the day before who were planning on attending but I wasn't sure what my turnout would be for a mid-week (Wednesday) meet and greet at 8:00 in the morning. I was pleasantly surprised when 11 people showed up for my coffee event. 

There were actually a couple of reasons why I decided to host an event mid-week. One, I enjoy meeting other geocaching people, putting names to faces of some of the caches that I'm probably going to find later during that trip. Two was a purely selfish reason. I wanted an extra cache type in Mesa County, Colorado to help me with that challenge I was working on for 6 different cache types in 20 different counties. We all had a good time at the event and then we said our goodbyes and I headed out to Colorado National Monument.

I've known about Colorado National Monument for as long as I can remember. My parents took us to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument back in the early 70s, so I'm at a loss as to why they didn't drive the extra hour north to visit Colorado National Monument. Needless to say, it's been on my list of places to visit ever since and it didn't disappoint. As I approached the entry point to the park, the ranger told me that there might not be a whole lot of parking at any of the pullouts or parking lots as there was a naturalization ceremony going on at the park's amphitheater. Glad I was told ahead of time, so I made do with what I could that day, but it wasn't much of a problem. Rangers were overlooking some sketchy parking that was happening on the sides of the main road, which was understandable given the circumstances.

As I drove up the road, I pulled out several times to enjoy the view and work on a couple of earth caches. Balanced Rock, in the second photo, was one of the formations I was able to see from below. Most of the park, you're looking downwards into the valley below, but I was still working my way to the mesa above. The wind and water erosion that created this formation and others in the park will eventually destroy them as well, but that's the geologic cycle at work. 

As I continued up, I saw birds circling in the distance to the east towards Grand Junction and the town of Fruita. I came around and found another viewpoint and stopped there. There was a man viewing the birds with binoculars and I asked him if he knew what they were and he stated Golden Eagles. About five minutes later, we both spotted a Bald Eagle soaring along the ridge line. I think that's the first time I've ever seen Golden Eagles anywhere outside of a zoo and only the second time I've seen a Bald Eagle. Later in the day, I saw another Golden Eagle as it flew over my head at another viewpoint. I inquired at the visitors center later on and learned that Golden Eagles nest in the park, but Bald Eagles are rare sightings as they live and nest down in the valley near the Colorado River. I thought I was rather fortunate to experience both within five minutes of each other.

While continuing my drive along the road, I stopped at another viewpoint and got to see one of the main features of the park, Independence Monument. One of the early explorers of the area climbed to the top of this particular rock and planted an American Flag on the summit, some 450 feet above the valley floor. It's become a tradition for rock climbers to ascend the formation on July 4th and fly the flag each year.

I decided on one short hike to get out to another viewpoint, then after that headed to the visitors center to gather more information about the park. By that time, there were all sorts of parking spots as many of the people who had attended the naturalization ceremony in the morning had left. I spent another hour or so in the park, then left to find some geocaches outside of the park as I'd done all of the earth caches inside the park.

To the north of the park, I found a road that had a series of challenge caches on it and I traversed the length of that road finding all of the challenges. This was actually of particular interest to me as most of the challenges were about finding different types of caches in a certain number of counties. One of the challenges wanted me to find a multi cache in 25 different counties. A multi cache is a cache that usually has at least two different spots you have to visit in order to find the cache. Before the trip, I'd found multi caches in 24 different counties and I'd literally found my 25th county earlier that day when I found a multi cache in Grand Junction on my way to visit Colorado National Monument. I'd say that was fortuitous.

All in all, it was a very good day. I'd enjoyed myself tremendously sightseeing in the monument and then had a good time geocaching later in the afternoon. As noted above, the monument didn't disappoint and I was thrilled with all of the geology and the spectacular scenery. Eventually, I got back to my hotel room, had dinner at a nearby restaurant and had a good night's sleep. The next day would also be a big day of sightseeing somewhere else.