Mark and I did some geocaching on Monday, but it turned out to be a bit of a bummer. The first cache we tried for was somewhere along the Fish Creek National Recreation Trail near Scofield. I’d never been in the area, and I was surprised by how nice it was. There’s a campground at the trailhead, but there was no “Fee Area” sign, so presumably it’s free for day and overnight use. The trail climbs 1,100 vertical feet over the course of 10 miles to Skyline Drive, but the cache was just over a mile upstream from the campground. When we were within half a mile of the cache, we came to what was supposed to be a bridge over Fish Creek, but the bridge was out. We bushwhacked through some thick stuff up and downstream looking for a place to cross, but the spring runoff was just too high, and we ended up heading back to the car empty-handed. I thought the trail and campground were awesome, so I’ve got plans to return late in the summer for a weekend of camping, and possibly a mountain bike ride from Skyline down to camp.
I didn’t originally have plans to find any more than just the one cache, but after not being able to cross the creek, we decided to try for a couple of others along Skyline Drive. It’s normally a pretty nice road, something I thought my Taurus could handle, but I didn’t count on there being so much snow up there. At about 9,100 feet in elevation, we hit a snow drift across the road that extended for about 75 yards, and it was so thick there was no way my car was getting over it. There was a short road going around it (apparently this snow drift is annually-occurring), and I tried getting my car onto that road, but it’s just not cut out for that kind of driving. I actually had one rear wheel about ten inches off the ground trying to get through a slight dip and up the hill onto the bypass road, but the opposite front tire just kept spinning in the mud. It looks like all those caches along Skyline will have to wait until later in the summer as well.
The kids are both pretty sick right now. Bradley has an ear infection and intermittent fever, and Michael has bronchitis and strep throat. They’ve both been in to see the doctor though, and they’re taking antibiotics to get rid of the nasty stuff. For most of yesterday and all of today, they’ve both just sat on the couch or in bed dozing most of the time, and neither of them has eaten much. It’s not as though they eat much normally, but now I’m afraid that they’re going to wither away. Each of them ate something substantial for dinner tonight (if you call cold cereal “dinner”), and I’m hoping they’re back to normal by the weekend.