Friday sure was an exciting day. The excitement actually began Thursday evening, when “The Team” posted their Fall 2007 Contest Series. Every year, these guys go out into the Utah desert and bury bottles, each with instructions on how to proceed to find another bottle or numbered tag, usually with some crazy math or geographical projections involved in finding the next step. I’m teamed up with some guys from up north, and since I already had Friday off work, they sent me down early that morning to find several of the bottles. I found a couple of them easily, but others were nearly impossible without either a metal detector or a better 4×4 vehicle.
I started out near the Wickiup, quickly found the bottle there, then proceeded to the San Rafael Reef south of I-70. I spent almost two hours there looking near some old uranium mine shafts, but came up empty. The canyon through the reef was simply awesome, and even though I didn’t find the buried bottle, it was the most rewarding stop of the day. After that, I headed east on I-70 and found another one just off the interstate, then proceeded farther east toward the town of Cisco. The road was rough and rocky, and eventually I came across a washout that my truck couldn’t get past. The sun had gone down by then and it was too late to try another road. I got a call on my cell phone from two of my teammates who had arrived in Green River that afternoon, and they were going to take their metal detector to the San Rafael Reef location to try to locate the bottle that I couldn’t find earlier in the day. So, I headed back toward Green River while they looked, and I had time to do some geocaching there while I waited for them. Eventually they found it and returned to Green River, and two other teammates showed up around that same time. We spent about two hours at Ray’s Tavern eating dinner, making plans, and just bullshitting. Their plans for Saturday included a lot of driving around the Moab area, and I would have just been tagging along for the ride, so I opted to head home instead of fueling my truck up (at $3.55/gallon!) for another full day of driving. That should leave me with enough cash for another weekday run down that way, which should put our team ahead of all the others competing for the prize money.