Cachin' in the Tiny Little Town

Geocaching is such a neat way to spend time at places you might never otherwise stop... even places in your own backyard.

We took a little drive last weekend just around our Tiny Little Town, seeking out geocaches and discovering little gems we didn't know existed, or had never taken the time to really look at.

There was just enough hiking to keep us active without exhausting us (as some caches have done!) and the girls had a great time picking out little treasures to take home.


It'd been almost a year since we'd cached last... we had to brush up on our micro-finding skills a bit before we found some, but we managed.

It's funny to think folks walk right by caches all the time and haven't any idea they're even there.

Summer Adventures 2011 - Geocaching

I keep trying to explain geocaching to friends, and I keep getting the same response - mostly a bunch of smiles and nods and "uh-huhs." You know, the raised eyebrows that resonate with "Yeah, that sounds like fun. Not."

So let me try it again, this time with pictures of my personal favorite caches from the past couple of weeks.

Geocaching is a sort of "treasure hunt". There are caches placed all over the world. A cache can be anything from a film canister with a log in it to a big rubbermaid container. The larger ones are generally filled with "treasure", items not usually of much value, toys, keychains, other trinkets. You're welcome to take any item you find in a cache, so long as you replace it with something of your own that is of similar value. If you look at geocaching.com and map your area, you'll see what I mean. They're everywhere.

Our favorite caches are the ones that take us on incredible hikes and drives to places we never would have gone otherwise, places we didn't know existed. Like this:

A 130-year old narrow gauge railroad bed through the Red Mountain mining district in the San Juan mountains.

It's such an interesting way of exploring your world, and in cases like this, of exploring history. We could look at pictures, like this one of a train on this exact same railroad:
And we will look at those pictures, but what better way to really understand the magnitude of this accomplishment than to walk along it, see it for ourselves?

We hiked a little over a mile on the way to the cache, which was placed near this turntable:
The only one of it's kind in the Rocky Mountains, tucked away amidst the ghost towns of the Red Mountain mining district.

The "treasure" of this hike wasn't the cache. It was the experience of walking the path of miners over a century before us, imagining the life they lived, the work they did, admiring their determination to send a train through country that was hardly accessible by horseback, all for the desperate desire to strike it rich on gold or silver. It was seeing firsthand how much the earth can change in 130 years, how she can "bounce back" after being exploited, trees and undergrowth once again taking over their rightful ground.

I realize not everyone can come to Colorado and follow this particular trail, learn these particular lessons. But everywhere, there are little "secrets" like these, secrets that can be known to anyone who cares to find out. I encourage everyone to give it a shot. Not every cache is as interesting and as exciting as this, and you don't even always find them, but each is fun in it's own right.

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Here are some other photos from interesting places where we've found caches recently.

A faucet piped into a hot springs near Chattanooga, an abandoned mining town outside of Silverton, right off the Red Mountain Pass. Who would've thought you'd ever find bathtubs on the side of the Million Dollar Highway with naturally warm water pumped in? We figure it was put there in the 60's... and the faucet still turns on and off! Too cool. Unfortunately, the "hot" springs are only lukewarm now. But still neat to see.

This cache was near the top of Cottonwood Pass, outside of Taylor Canyon near Almont, CO. The view up here was amazing. I mean, we see some pretty incredible views doing the kinds of things we do, but this one was just awesome. There aren't words to describe it. 12,000 feet at the top of a mountain, and then further up for the cache, looking out over the Collegiate Peaks with Taylor reservoir in the distance, mountains and valleys on all sides. Breathtaking.
This picture was taken after we drove through a lake to find a cache.
I'm all about gorgeous, pristine lakes at 11,000 foot altitudes. Can't say I'm crazy about driving through them, but you know... there was a cache on the other side. Happily, it was shallow and all went well.
In this one we're hiking up over an avalanche, north out of Crested Butte. You read about avalaches, how dangerous they are. But you don't quite understand the reality of that until you walk along and look at the hills above you, trees snapped off at ground level or uprooted entirely, a solid bank of snow who-knows-how-many feet deep when it settles. The whole side of the mountain was basically cleared of vegetation. We never did find this cache - after traversing the avalanche we discovered we'd have to cross a raging, icy river. Not a good plan at the height of spring run-off, so we gave up.

These are just a few of the caches we've found in the past couple of weeks, along with all kinds of other adventures in the Colorado mountains. I think we found something like 40 caches altogether between both recent camping trips. Each one took us to somewhere worth seeing - a creek inlet, a beaver pond, lots of very old cemeteries, the tops of mountains and down along creek beds, ghost towns and thriving mountain towns.

You'll find your own treasure in it - some folks love to dig through the caches and see what others have left. Others love the hunt once they get to the point where they should be looking. Some crazy ones love the whole concept of 'micros', searching for minuscule capsules hidden in very public places, often impossible to find (I hate micros.) Our treasure is the discovery that happens while we're getting to the cache. All it takes is a GPS (or a downloadable app on your SmartPhone) and you'll be off and running. Do give it a shot. And let me know how it goes!

Memorial Day Weekend

It was windy this past weekend, not at all pleasant for laying around in the back yard in a bathing suit sipping strawberry lemonade and reading a good book as I'd originally intended.

But when life gives you lemons wind...

Daddy had great fun flying the stunt kite.

Chloe almost got carried away by the stunt kite.

On Monday we decided to try running away from the wind by going for a drive to Silver Jack Reservoir. We did succeed in escaping the wind...



And instead found some snow. The snow was actually falling here for a short time.

We found a geocache at a historic cemetery in Cimarron, Colorado.



We found another geocache on a lovely little hike near Big Cimarron campground. The dog had splendid fun as well.



We saw some beautiful scenery...


And plenty of deer.



When we attempted to cross Owl Creek Pass, we saw this:



It's always disappointing to see fallen trees across the road when you look out your windshield. And we didn't bring the chain saw. Sigh. We had to turn back the way we came, which was not nearly as interesting as I'm sure the top of Owl Creek Pass would have been, though we did get another view of the pretty scenery. We spent a total of nine and a half hours in the truck. It's a good thing we like each other.

And since we spent The Whole Day driving yesterday, the girls and I made our Memorial Day cake today instead.



They ate the watermelon Cora was so desperate to buy from the store. It lived up to her expectations.


Overall, it really was a lovely long weekend. I hope everyone else enjoyed plenty of great food, relaxation, and great family time too!

Homeschool Notes: Field Trip!

Mostly, homeschooling at our house looks like this:
But now that the sun is out and the weather is warm, none of us have the patience for this Sitting Still Indoors business. Once in awhile we just can't do it anymore. On those days, homeschooling looks more like this:



A trip to Rifle Falls for a picnic and nature walk was a whole lot more fun than practicing multiplication tables and tracing letters, to be certain.

We had a lovely discussion about fossil fuels and our consumption of them on the way to Rifle as we drove past the rigs. "But, um.... won't we run out of gas eventually, if we get it that way?" Exactly, darlin'. You keep on practicing riding that two wheeler.

We covered more topics than I can count- stalactites and stalagmites and the formation of caves from mineral deposits; the nocturnal habits of bats in the caves;

This is her "There is no way I'm going in that cave
and I can't believe you're even crazy enough to suggest it" face.

A study of birds, where Cora quickly learned that blue jays will happily eat cinnamon rolls; watching bugs skate around in the water below the falls, and seeing that if a moth gets wet, it can't fly anymore; And we learned that waterfall water is really, really cold and refreshing.



we watched and identified butterflies, plants, flowers, and fungi (because homeschoolers are known to carry field guides around in their backpacks.) We even stopped at the fish hatchery (where I failed to get the camera out) and we got to feed the fish and talk to a lady about their life cycle. (Because when random strangers learn that you homeschool, they take it upon themselves to teach your children something. Am I the only one who's noticed that?)

A giant mushroom growing
on the underside of a tree trunk.

And on the way back home, we even said all the multiplication tables. So we didn't end up skipping math, after all.



And of course, there was the study in compass reading and the use of GPS when we stopped for a few geocaches while we were in the area - three micros, for any of you that enjoy caching. Micros are so hard for me. It was exciting to find three in one day, with the help of the Daddy.

Geocaching in the City

We spent the afternoon geocaching in town yesterday, since it had rained and we weren't so much in the mood to get muddy. We found some caches, and didn't find others. We haven't tried ones in the city before, so the experience was new.

What I loved about it was that it forced you to find little bits of nature hiding out in the dirty ol' city. Things you wouldn't expect to find unless you looked closely and paid attention to detail.

Like this mourning dove sitting on her nest inside some bushes right on Main Street:


Or this turtle taking a break from his swimming at a pond just down the street from our house.



I thought this giant hollow tree was something of a hidden gem in the city - I had no idea it was there, right behind Office Depot.



Of course there were the usual animals too: some ducks to chase


And some geese to be wary of.



It was so nice to discover these little pieces of nature.

But geocaching in the city is tough. There are people everywhere. Stealth is practically impossible. It's not like going out for a long hike with no one around, when you can search to your heart's content without having to worry about whether people are watching and wondering what the heck you're doing. It's a whole different game doing it this way.

Are there any other geocachers out there? We're new to it, but so far it's really turning out to be a blast, and a fun way to spend time together as a family!

Finally found one

We finally found a geocache! Well, actually, we found two. We went for a hike yesterday, and I wrote down the coordinates for a few caches. We looked for them on the way back to town, and found them. Hooray! The first was a log-only cache, but the second has some little kiddie trade items, so Chloe got to trade and take along a prize. It was cute. I'm not sure how far we hiked yesterday - a good 3 hours' worth of walking though, in all. My behind is sore from all the uphill climbing!

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It's Sunday. Almost always, we go to my parents' house for breakfast, but today my mother has a life, and is not cooking for us. She's out riding her pony & cart with a bunch of other ladies from a riding club she joined, how cool is that? So we ended up sleeping til almost 8. Wow. I can't remember the last time I stayed in bed so late! Some people love to sleep in. I'm definitely not like that. I get all anxious if I sleep past 6 most of the time. But whatever, I feel good for having gotten so much sleep.

I think we're sticking around home today, we have lots to get done around the house. And at 6 we are going to the in-law's house. Blah. Thankfully though, we can't stay too long since Andrew has to be up early for work, and needs his sleep.

'Tis all for now...

Nothing to say

I haven't blogged in awhile. I haven't been feeling very good either, but mostly, it's just because I really don't have anything to say. :::gasp::: who ever would have thought that would happen? :o)

So the whole bronchitis thing really kicked my butt. I'm just now starting to feel back to normal. That is, I'm sneezing and my eyes are all itchy again, so the allergies have taken back over. Ugh. I love spring usually, but I'm starting to hate it!

On Wednesday I took Chloe to Coldstone Creamery for a treat in honor of her finishing all of the pink books in the Reader Rabbit series we're doing. The books, which come with a computer game, were my little brother's. The game is designed to work on Windows 3.1, but we made it work on our computer. She's doing so well! Now we're into the yellow books which focus a lot more on punctuation - apostrophes for possessive nouns, quotation marks and commas, along with the usual periods, question marks, and exclamation points. She's a little intimidated by all those weird marks on the page, but she's doing well so far. and she mostly loves it. Math usually consists of a bunch of jelly beans (or m&ms, sunflower seeds, beads, corks, or whatever else) and a sheet with 5-10 addition problems. She uses the objects to actually show the numbers, counts them together and gets her answer. She likes doing it, so we keep doing it. When she's really comfortable with that, we'll do subtraction. Aside from those things, school isn't anything structured, we just do what we feel like doing and I try to find a way to teach her something from it. Homeschooling is proving to be very entertaining and a great workout for my brain (and patience!)

In the crafty area - haven't done much of anything, really. I made a cloth bag yesterday, but haven't finished it yet. Just more scraps of fabric patched together. I love shopping with cloth. And I love how many people are doing it now! And knitting - I have a soaker almost finished, but not quite. Need to do the ribbing around the legs which is my least favorite part, and I'm procrastinating. As soon as I finish this one, I need to make another. My baby girl is growing fast! I kind of want to spend the afternoon tie dying. I have lots of diapers that could use some color, and Chloe likes doing it. We'll see though... not sure what I'll be up to yet.

So I've been reading Katey's blog and all about her family's adventures with geocaching. And I think I'm finally convinced that we need to try it. It sounds like lots of fun. Andrew had never heard of it, so I told him about it, and he agreed that it could be fun and said we can try it a bit. We don't have a handheld GPS, but my dad does and said we could borrow it. So Chloe and I might decided to spend the afternoon geocaching instead of tie dying. :o) I think there's one at a nearby park that might make a good starting point for us to learn how this all works. Anyone else do this?

Well, I suppose that's all I'll write for today. I have a lot to do this morning if we're going to have the afternoon free to do something fun.