Saturday, I got up fairly early, and managed to find a geocache I hadn't been able to find before, which gave me a mile of hiking.
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The geocache has "eco challenge" in the title because
the area is full of trash and homeless camps. This is an
abandoned homeless camp, it looks like. |
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| A relaxing place to stop and rest? |
Then I headed to the barn to see Trigger and help S take photos of some horses she has available for sale.
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| Trigger checking out a fellow palomino (paint) |
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| That's Trigger on the right |
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| Most adorable horse EVAR! |
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| Trigger and the curly making friends |
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| Apparently he doesn't like me taking his picture any more than Nathan does! |
After I left the barn, I found four more caches in the vicinity. Unfortunately, a couple of them mentioned needing tweezers in the description, and I'd forgotten Nathan's pocketknife at home. So I skipped those. At least they mentioned it, though...better than finally finding it and not being able to sign the log!
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| Gorgeous view! |
Then I came home and processed about half of the 500 photos I'd taken of S's horses. :-)
Sunday, I slept in a tiny bit, no thanks to Cookie for waking me up and keeping me awake from 4:00 to 6:00, and unfortunately just barely missed a call from my brother in Thailand. :-( But when I finally hit the road, I went to Shevlin park and knocked out four caches on the Aspen Hall side of the park. Which was tricky, because I wasn't getting cell service, and hadn't downloaded the caches to my GPS unit, so I had to go back to the car and write down the coordinates for all the caches so I could manually plug them into my GPS. But then I didn't have access to the hints and prior logs while on the trail. I also realized (luckily before going back to the car) that I didn't have the memory card in my camera, so I put the big camera back and only had my phone that day.
I couldn't find the nano that's right near Aspen Hall, but I didn't try all that hard because of all the people around. I found all but one along the trail, including a multi-stage, then found the one I'd missed before on the way back. My coordinates were off the first time around, but I found it easily on the second try. I saw some evidence of wildlife, including some poop that was very deer-like, but too big to be deer--evidence of elk.
I got back to the parking lot and took advantage of the porta potty plus the drinks in my car, then parked just a ways away to try a different cache. It was in a really treacherous area, and I got a little bold on the rocks, surprising even myself, but found the cache. There were some stoner kids up there, too, but they didn't mind me clambering around on the rocks. They probably would have found it hilarious that that was find number 69 for me. :-)
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| These are the rocks I was clambering around on |
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This was in a crevice at the top of those rocks,
though I'm guessing it ended up there because of humans |
I stopped back by the college to find one there that I'd tried to find twice before, both times at dusk, but had no luck once again. Ugh.
As I left the college, the winding mountain road that takes me home had a traffic jam. People were standing around and sitting in their cars with their cameras. My first thought was that there had been a car accident, though none of the stopped cars seemed damaged. Then I figured it was tourists getting all excited about a few deer. Then I spotted them myself--a whole herd of elk. I tried to snap a few photos, too, but kept moving so I didn't irritate the people behind me too much.
