Why?

I went for a geocaching run this morning. Left the house early enough to watch a big orange moon sink down over the western horizon, followed by a subdued sunrise over the San Andreas, as I zoomed north on I25. My goal for this morning was a piece of geoart created a few years back, a series of 37 challenge caches all based on caching stats. I actually don't qualify for very many, but I wanted something easy to run around on that would take up the better part of the morning, giving me time to do chores back home later in the day.

It was still cold when I parked, near a windmill watering area. This area of the Jornada is utterly bleak. Being out here reminds me of when we first moved to Las Cruces when I had a job assisting a wildlife biologist out here. 3-4 days a week, we'd get well before sunrise and drive out here to catch sage sparrows. I remembered sandy mesquite dunes, but the area where this geoart is located was not dune-like at all. And it also had a lot more grass and weeds. I started off by heading to Challenge #22, where I proceeded to fail to find the little bugger. After 15 minutes, the cold was getting to me and I figured it was better to keep going and try this one again on my way back since it is so close to where I parked. I jogged off to do the series in a CCW fashion. I soon realized that my choice of footwear was not ideal. I had on my minimalist running shoes and ankle gaiters. These shoes let you feel the ground with thin soles and minimal padding. They were very quickly covered in goat-heads which for the most part are a tiny bit shorter than the thickness of the soles. I did feel some poking through at various points in the run, and would have to stop and try to identify the offending seed and yank it out. But worse was the occasional mesquite twig/thorn. I got skewered a few times quite painfully. Thicker tougher soles would have been better, but at least the ankle gaiters ept the grass seeds out of my socks.

After my initial DNF, the rest of the caches were mostly quick finds, letting me set up a rhythm of jogging/caching. Only one cache had a wet log, somewhere around #15-#13. The terrain between caches was not that fun. Lots of thorny nasty stuff. It was only on a few rare occasions that I could break out into much of a good run. And when I did pick up some speed, I tended to miss the next geocache by getting off ona wrong bearing, and have to spiral back in to it. Still, I averaged about 3 minutes per cache, including finding the buggers and signing my name to the logs. Not too shabby!

If I was finding the jogging painful, the dog had an even harder time. Most of the time I would arrive at a cache, she would be 100+ ft behind, limping with one paw up. Those goat-heads really are nasty! We took a water break at the bottom of the "period", then cleaned up the rest of the track up. It was a fun morning, despite getting poked through my shoes. But why do it? Looking over the challenges now, I only qualify for 11 out of the 37 challenges. Most of these challenges are way out of my league, requiring serious amounts of caching. Maybe someday I'll qualify, which is perhaps why I bothered running the whole series today. This area of the desert isn't really one that merits a return trip. I used to think it was lame if people signed a challenge cache that they didn't qualify for, only to change their on-line log to a "find" later on. But here I am doing just that. Why? The desert wants to know...