#100

As you know from a previous post this month, hubby has been bitten by the geocache bug. He has been wanting to cache along a 32 mile stretch of desert road called the Florence Kelvin Highway. Highway being a misnomer because 12 miles of the road is paved; the rest a well-graded gravel road through the desert. The reason for caching along this highway is the number of caches; more than 300. The caches are placed close together, about every 600 feet. This is referred to as a power cache. The same person has placed 300 hidden containers along the roadway. Others have placed caches now and then off the main road bringing the count to more than 300. 

We drove 30 miles Thursday morning to begin the caching adventure. Hubby needed a driver. I parked and the two of us walked along the road looking for buried treasure. He had the GPS so I was guessing at distance for finding caches. After missing a couple, and him having to back-track and log, I became the driver. He sat in the back seat with the van door open. I would motor 500-600 feet.  He would hop out, locate the pile of rocks, move them, find the canister, and we would sign the log.  He would return the cache and hop back in and we were off to the next one. We had no idea how many we would log that day. 

I have cached only one other time back home. It was our first time out and I found the first two caches of the day. We logged three on that adventure. Hubby went out several times on his own collecting 20+ caches before we left for the winter. He has logged over 200 caches in the last month. But Thursday's adventure was my first caching trip in AZ. There is very little variety to a film canister hidden in a pile of rocks next to a road sign or under a bush next to the road. (That is how most of the 300 are hidden.) The venture was about numbers for hubby.

The caches hidden by others, off the highway provided the variety. Variety in size, location, terrain, and challenge of the find. Here are some of the more interesting aspects of our adventure.

This was my first & best find of the day.

It is a spent .22 shell embedded in a post.

It required a TOT to extract the cache & the log.

TOT = tool of the trade = needle-nosed pliers

This was another find of mine.

A spent shotgun shell also buried in a fence post.

Sometimes the container is larger. 

This one was camouflaged with spray paint and

hidden in a dead saguaro stump.

Can you see the hidden cache?

Sometimes it is the materials used to hide

the caches that keep the hunt adventurous.

This cache was at the base of a saguaro,

under a pile of rocks.

This cache introduced us to a second crested saguaro along this highway. 

We knew about another one posted here.

Sometimes the container is rather large and not really hidden.

This ammo box was found under a bush.

It had room for treasures left by other cachers.

Sometimes hubby leaves something

 and adds to the collection.

Imagine my surprise when after 97 cache finds,

I reached number 100!

YEA!

Replacing the film canister back under the pile of rocks

for the next cacher.

This cache was #84 along the highway of 300, but

because we had found the others along the way, off the

highway, I had reached a milestone, albeit a rather small one,

in the world of geocaching.

Our reward for a very successful day of power geocaching...

dinner at the Greek restaurant in Florence!

We cached from 8:30 to 5:00 along about 9 miles of road.

We got more accomplished than hubby imagined.

Several more days of of power caching and we will 

have logged all 300!

Be watching the blog for the rest of this adventure...