It has been a long weekend. Mike and Allison showed up Friday evening later than expected after hitting a rock in their Subaru and bending two wheels. I went with Mike to get a used wheel at Grako’s to replace the one on which the bead wouldn’t seal, then we had a late dinner and spent the rest of the evening getting ready for our hike the next day.
We (Mark, Mike, and I) spent Saturday hiking all over the San Rafael Reef just north of I-70. It was about 5.3 miles total, but it felt like much more. In the first cache we found, there was a tiny amount of weed inside of a small flavored-cigar tube. I’d heard of people finding such things in geocaches, but never thought I’d find it myself. We ended up crushing it up and scattering it on the ground. We found 12 caches in all, but only three that I’d not previously found. I (again) missed out on several of the “Wonders of the Reef” series of caches, but I plan on returning soon to find the remaining three. Each time I hike there, I end up getting exhausted too soon, and it’s usually accompanied by a headache. I don’t know if it’s the steep slope and the exertion from climbing it that does it, but I don’t like it. Honestly, I’m bored with that section of the San Rafael Reef, but there’s still some 50 miles of the Reef left for me to explore.
Lately there have been a few geocachers in the Carbon County area who are really getting into the hobby. It used to be that when I placed a new geocache, it would sit for weeks before somebody got around to finding it, and more often than not it was somebody from out of the area who got “First to Find.” Today, two groups of people ran into each other trying to get FTF on the cache that Mark and I placed last weekend. That’s pretty amazing, considering that the cache I placed within the city limits in November sat for weeks before somebody found it. And yesterday, while I was out hiking in the Swell, Traci answered a phone call for me at home–a new geocacher had called asking for a hint on another cache that I hid in town. Maybe now there’ll be a little welcome competition on getting FTF, and possibly a few more caches closer to home for me to find.