Moab Memories - Saturday Morning

This last week my family and I headed down to Moab.  We were heading down to the Utah Geocachers Association fall meeting, and to spend some time in a place I have never been. 

Ok, I have to take the time to admit to the world that I am from Southern Utah.  I grew up two hours from Bryce Canyon national park, and I was only two and a half hours from Arches national park.  My high school used to compete with Moab in many sports.

Yet in all my life (well that I can recall) I have never been to Moab. We got close, every year we went to Lake Powell.  Also I saw a lot of red sandstone at my home.  So it was just never on my list of things to do.  As I got older, I just found other places to visit, many people took trips down there and I never did.  So it was about time.

I was exited when Moab came up as an option and I pushed for it for two reasons.  The first was the chance for me to go there, and the second was that UTAG had never had a meeting there.  It was time to go see another place.

I thought for a while I might be going alone, there was some waffling on the part of me and my family.  In the end we decided to go.  Actually it was pretty late, two days before we committed to go.  That also meant that we needed to reserve a room.

Gah, just for your information, do not try and get an inexpensive hotel room in a tourist town a few days before you plan on going.  So we found a place an hour away in Green River.

We headed down to Green River Friday night and crashed at the motel.  The kids went to the swimming pool and I crashed.  :P Long day, a few hour drive, some people love those things, i don't.

Dino Track

Goal #1 - Dino Tracks

I did not want to spend the entire day driving, so I tried to schedule things with a stop here and a stop there.  The geocaching event/lunch was not until noon, so we had some time.

The first stop on the adventure was to the Copper Ridge Dinosaur Tracks.  This was actually one of the early Earthcaches that were published in Utah.  I had seen it on a map for a number of weeks, and it was on my list.  Isn't a dinosaur track one of things every kid wants to see?

Well this was one that I was sure the kids would like. We left the highway and headed off road to the cache site.  We were in the car and it took a little bit of work to drive around the ruts in the sand from the recent rains, but we made our way to the trailhead.  The hike up to the cache site was pretty easy to make.

The kids got exited when we got to the site. You could find the actual tracks pretty simply.  People had taken small stones and surrounded the actual tracks.  They spent a lot of time poking around, and we walked a bit up the trail until we got the nice sign saying "Stay out of old mines, they are radioactive".  So we headed back.  It was a nice start to the day.

Wilsons Arch

Goal #2 San Juan County

San Juan county of course.   Actually not just the county but I needed to grab Wilsons Arch.    The arch is right by the side of the road.  Of course the trip to Moab from Green River is normally 45 Minutes.  We turned it into a three and half hour drive with the few stops. This was the first arch that we saw for the day, but it would not be the last of them.  I took a walk up into the hill nearby, then took a moment to snap some photos.  the light was not actually very good, but I got the information that I needed.

Goal #3 Virtual and a TraditionalMy Daughter waiting for us to return for the hunt through the weeds.

Yep I had to grab another cache while on the day. Actually a few caches.  The first was at a home that had been carved out of the canyon side.  At first I thought it would be stupid to build a home in the stone, until I thought how it may always keep it a little cooler than a house.  So to each their own.  The cache was called Holes N the Ground.   Then around the hill to a traditional cache.  That one did not turn out as well as I thought.  The walk was a ways through the weeds and I found the wrong way. 

Goal #4 - Event

My favorite part of most caching days is the event.  I am a social person that drives my kids nuts.  I took all the coins that I had mine and many that lyonden_ut had given me a while back. 

He gave me many of his coins on the condition that I made sure that I take them to events and share them with other people.  So here they came.  There were about 15 that were given to me from him, and I have about 150 to 180 coins by now, and I have a bunch of pathtags.  I seem to get one or two every month on average.  I need more containers to share them with, I have a few books that make them easy to share, they are far easier than the plastic sheets.  I used them and I seem to drop them all over and loose them.  So I moved to the other books, they hold them better.

That is it for the morning.  I will write up my arches trip all by itself.

Red Hills Hike

I went down to my parents this last weekend for Easter.  It was a great trip, but the nicest part was a hike that my wife and I took.

There was a lot of rain this last weekend, but on Saturday everything cleared up for a little while. 

My family had a big get together, and an Easter egg hunt.

Of course after everything and after the cold weather I decided to head after a cache.  There was a cache up the canyon near my home that had not been found often.  In fact I had looked for it another time and the coords had placed me up a steep rocky slope and scrambling to keep from falling to my death.

Well this time he had updated his coords and we decided to head up and check things out.

So my wife and I took some free time and broke away from the family that were mostly just relaxing and eating candy.  We headed up to the mouth of the canyon.

Like many of the canyons the mouth of this one is full of a lot of trash.  A lot of trash, targets, and many other items that people have dumped.

I grew up near here and had hiked the canyon many times, but for my wife this was a first time up this canyon.  It is really impressive and I love the rock formations.  There are a few old lime kilns from 80 years ago, one at the mouth of the canyon, and another that is ways up the canyon. 

We hiked up the canyon and we looked for a while for the cache. The cache had been placed right under a small gully.  It had a small crack in the lid so the entire thing was full of slimy nasty stuff.  I could not even get the log out, and when I got water on my hands they stank for some time.  It was vile.

In the end I moved it about six feet out of the gully and into a sagebrush.  I put a rock on top of it and hopefully that will help keep the water out when things finally dry out.

After that we started to walk up the canyon.  We headed up another quarter of a mile before we reached a small box canyon where I found a place to hide a new one.

These canyons do not get visited much, and the caches do not get visited much either.  They are kind of off the beaten path.

There is not much growth and many parts of the canyon are scoured clean of rocks and dirt.  The rains tend to clean all the waist out of the canyon and dump them on the roads below.

In all we spent a few hours up here.  I hope to go back and visit more, someday. 

There are more to find, and more caches to place.

Update on 2011-04-26 04:45 by firennice

Oldest & Favorite Caches in Idaho

I received an email request to add an Oldest cache in Idaho list, and favorites.

I do not plan on adding all the links (because of the time it takes) like I did with the oldest 100. 

So here you go.

The oldest caches?

1	17-Jun-00	24	Traditional Cache Camels Prairie Stash by Moun10Bike, Cindy, Laura and Jasmine (GC25)
2	21-Jun-00	1	Traditional Cache Eggcellent by Ry Jones (GC27)
3	21-Jun-00	2	Traditional Cache Two roads by Ry Jones (GC26)

and the favorites?

24	Traditional Cache Camels Prairie Stash by Moun10Bike, Cindy, Laura and Jasmine (GC25)
15	Earthcache Shoshone Falls Earthcache by DzzyOnes (GC16YNE)
12	Traditional Cache Priest Lake Underwater Adventure by dblply2 (GC1452W)
12	Earthcache Crater Rings of Idaho by maverick_65g (GC10EBR)
10	Unknown Cache Davy Jones Locker by Da_Muggle & The_Thief (GC230JX)
10	Earthcache Craters of the Moon National Monument by The Wandering Stars (GC10F0Y)
10	Multi-cache SPYDER CAVES by Team Spyder Balls (GCM0GX)

Update on 2011-03-01 17:28 by firennice

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Update on 2011-03-01 23:51 by firennice

Favorite Caches in Utah

I took the time to play in Excel, and I sorted out the favorite 60 caches in Utah.  I was happy to see that at the moment I had 14 caches that had a favorite point.  It cheered me up to think that someone liked my caches enough to list them as a favorites.  Next spring will be two years and some will need an overhaul for the upcoming year.

The list does no have any multicaches, wherigos, webcams, or letterboxes.  There were none in the top 60 that were listed, so though some have points.. they did not come up on my list.   Next time I may go to the top 100.  That should add a few more.

I will update this periodically and see what the changes are.

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