Yesterday was great–in a way. I managed to drive the Mazda to within 0.52 miles of The Wickiup, and I was able to hike to the top and find the cache. The bad news? I didn’t get first to find. A gentleman from Mount Pleasant, who, like me, had been out there twice before finally finding it, managed to get FTF on Thursday. He still hasn’t logged the cache on Geocaching.com. I was pretty excited when I made it to the top, at least until I opened the cache and saw that he’d left his mark already. Here’s my log and a few pictures (scroll down to my March 12 entry).
After leaving The Wickiup, I drove north on the Buckhorn Wash road, and right before I got to the turnoff for the first cache I’d planned on finding, I got a flat tire. A sharp piece of limestone punched a hole in the left-rear tire, and the hole is big enough that I don’t think the tire can be repaired (it’s about a ½” long puncture). I spent about half an hour changing the tire, and just after I got done winching the flat back up under the Mazda, an Emery County Sheriff’s deputy pulled up alongside to make sure everything was alright. We talked for just a few minutes, then he headed back down the road (south toward I-70).
I kept going north and found a bunch of caches along the way. After finding the last one for the day, the same Sheriff’s deputy pulled up alongside me again, making sure I didn’t have another flat or something. I explained to him that I was just geocaching, which he had heard of and was aware of the locations of all the caches in the area. We bull-shitted for quite some time, mostly about different places in the Swell, and a few of the caches and cachers he’s had experience with. I kind of envy him–his job is to patrol the Buckhorn Wash road, and I can’t think of a better workplace than that.