It’s been a buzzy few days, and I don’t think it’s going to let up soon. The Utah Association of Geocachers held their annual fall meeting in Price, and I spent Friday evening placing ten temporary caches around town for a game that took place on Saturday. We spent all day Saturday at Pioneer Park with a bunch of our friends who we only see a few times a year, and it was a blast.
On Sunday I took the family for a drive down in the San Rafael Swell. We went to Olsen Reservoir, where the weekend before I’d seen a lot of waterfowl that you normally don’t see around these parts. The “reservoir” is really just a mud flat with a trickle of water running through the middle of it, but last weekend there were some cranes (or herons, I don’t really know the difference) and a lot of ducks there. I was hoping that Traci and the kids would get to see some this weekend, but there were no birds there. The kids had fun playing in the mud, and Torrey spent the entire time chasing dragonflies.
After Olsen Reservoir, we headed farther south to Buckhorn Reservoir. We had planned on hiking more than a mile round-trip to the water hole where I saw all the toads a couple of weeks ago, but some bad weather was rolling in so we hit Buckhorn instead. We didn’t stay very long–just enough for the boys to throw some rocks into the water and for Traci and I to walk around and stretch our legs a bit.
Then, we headed to the south side of Cedar Mountain to a place I’d been wanting to go for a few weeks. I saw this picture on the web, and I wanted to go there to place a geocache ever since. Once we got there, Traci didn’t like the looks of the cliffs and ledges that we’d have to hike up, so I hiked up with Torrey while she stayed at the truck with the kiddos. I could have spent all day hiking around on the rocks up there–I think the Curtis Formation is one of my favorites because of the interesting shapes that the rock erodes into (including Hamburger Rocks). However, I haven’t felt right about leaving Traci alone in the middle of nowhere since that incident last year, so I hurried up placing the cache, then we high-tailed it out of there.
Yesterday evening, a couple of new geocaches in Price got listed on geocaching.com, except they weren’t normal caches. They were puzzles that you had to solve in order to figure out the actual coordinates. One of them took me longer than it should have, but I finally figured it out today and found the cache on my lunch break. The other one was pretty damn tough, but with a slight hint from the guy who placed it, I was able to figure out the cipher and get the coordinates.
For the next couple of days, I’ll be getting ready to go camping this coming up weekend. I took Friday off work so we can leave town as soon as Michael gets out of school. It hardly seems worth going for just two days because the weather is just perfect for camping, but I’ve got 16 vacation days left for the remainder of the year, and I plan to use some of them for an extra-long camping trip in October sometime. Until then, I’ll settle for whatever I can get, and two days will have to do.