Trail Mix

February has been an exciting month for us. To date we have managed to maintain our ‘days never cached’ find challenge and starting January 29th we began our new cache streak attempt to break 15 days in a row. In the midst of all of this, we have planned a trip to Death Valley which could prove to make or break our goals for the year. On February 9th, we began our journey south first to Las Vegas where we planned to meet up with Tatterhood’s parents, Joe Teton and Anyatoo. Both of them are tour guides for Road Scholar and do frequent trips to the nearby national parks. It being winter, their focus has been on Death Valley. To ensure we found our cache for the day, we stopped off at an off ramp not far from home. I scrambled up a good sized hill and discovered a cache near a memorial for a CAT operator. Seemed like an odd place for a monument but just proved once again how Geocaching helps bring notice to things you never knew existed. The rest of the trip to Las Vegas was fairl...

With the success of January’s ‘days never cached’ challenge, we now move into February where statistically we have hardly ever cached. Sure this means only one cache a day pretty much everyday for this month, but with work, weather and having to travel to get to some of the locations that are near us; this has seemed like a daunting month. We decided early on that this would be the best month to attempt to break our 15 caching day streak. A further challenge to this is the fact that we’ve planned to go to Death Valley for a weekend during the same timeframe as the cache streak attempt. Our first cache find of February was actually supposed to be our last cache find of January. After I had solved the puzzle, we headed out to make the find. We looked for quite a while with no find and so had to give up and find another. When we got home, I did some research and found that the coordinates were a little off. On February 1st we headed out to attempt to find the cache again. We fo...

With January completed, we wanted to recap some of our January adventures and how we did in completing the ‘days never cached’ challenge. It has been unseasonably warm this winter with only one real major snowfall so far. This definitely played a factor in our ease of getting out and finding some Geocaches. I’m pleased to report that we accomplished our goal of finding at least one geocache on the days in January where we had never found a cache before. The task became a little difficult during the one snowfall we had, but we managed to survive thanks to some winter friendly caches and a virtual or two. It always amazes me the creativity of our geocaching community. Whether it’s a well placed cache, incredible camo or even a good pun play on words, the amount of quality caches out there after so many years is wonderful to see. On one excursion, we were led to a newly developed trail system and on another we headed out on a slush covered mud road. The way in was easy enough, ...

2018 has now arrived! This year we decided to make a few Geocaching goals. One of them is to complete our calendar of finds. What does this mean? Simply that Geocaching.com tracks what day you log a cache. So if we found a cache on January 1st of 2016 and January 1st of 2015, it would show on a chart that we have logged 2 caches on January 1st. With this being our 10th year of caching, we looked to see what days that we have never found a cache on and made it our goal to find at least one cache on each of those days. Our other caching goal is to beat our previous caching streak of 15 days in a row. If we combine the two goals, we have a good chance of delivering on this goal early in February, but it will be a tough one for us. January 1st also marked the opportunity to gain the First Cache of the Year Souvenir. To do that, we headed out and found a cache near a spot we use for target practice. It was a fairly easy find and it provided an excellent vantage point for...