Our First Geochaching Expedition

Today we went on our first hunt for a Geochache by ourselves. Neal had done some in Stillwell Store with another person.

We chose Mohawk Mesa Cache number GCG052 from Geochaching.com as our first endeavor as we will be leaving tomorrow for Demming and this one looked like it would give us some excercise and challenge.

The location is quite some ways from the highway over varying terrain, most of which is desert scrub. The problem that comes up is there is no direct way to get to the location. You have the coordinates for your GPS and have to work out the best route as you go. This causes some missteps and extra work.

Barbara is sitting at the base of the mesa in this photo which was taken after a long (for us old folks!) march around the toolies.
This photo of Neal is after he had gone up to the top of the Mesa in search of the cache. He found it after a bit of searching around. The cache was a plastic container which held a log book for us to sign. There were trade goods there also and you can trade some items for some from the cache.



The views from the top are magnificent.


Barbara elected to halt a bit down from the top as it was a harder and she had already used up a lot of energy to get this far. If you look closely you will see her in this photo. Click on it for a larger view.

We laughed going out as we then knew the best way to go and it took us MUCH less time exiting back to the car. We carried fanny packs with supplies in case we needed them and did take advantage of the grainola bars and water. The walking sticks were essential as the ground was crumbly and sandy.

We will be doing this more and more as we wander around. Demming has about 87 caches for us to find in the area! Geocaching is a growing hobby and there are about 900,000 caches in the US. Great way to see sites that we would never ever have an opportunity to see otherwise and get healthy excercise to boot.