Lab Cache for me! A Farewell to Fugads

I got home from work and picking up the kids and saw I had an email from one of my geocaching buddies, Updraft58. Turns out she had created a lab-cache just for my as part of the I <3 Geocaching promotion going on this month. I couldn't resist immediately heading out to find it, and my daughter and a dog we are dog-sitting accompanied me. We pulled up to a pull-off on A-mountain and made the short walk up to the coordinates. The lowering sun had turned the mountains golden, illuminating the Organs in their best light. Even after so many years of watching these mountains, they still take my breath away. Simply beautiful. We find the lab-cache, a piece of paper affixed to a pole where red-tail hawks often perch. The find code is simply MAY 2014, the date we are leaving town. The kind gesture, beautiful mountain glow... enough to make a man get all choked up. Thanks Updraft58 for this wonderful gesture. I will certainly miss Las Cruces, and the wonderful Geocachers here.

I "Heart" Geocaching in Las Cruces: Scavenger Hunt

This is the Lab-cache for my I <3 Geocaching in Las Cruces event, GC4Y8BP. The Lab-cache URL will redirect here since it doesn't provide a large enough format. I really want to showcase some of what Geocaching in Las Cruces is all about and make something that everyone could enjoy and participate in. But only one person can claim an actual find for the Lab-Cache. What to do.... How about a Scavenger Hunt!

Scavenger Hunt Rules

• Have fun!
• Be safe!
• Earn points for completing tasks. Some of these are very much like geocache types, others are challenges of varying degrees. All are meant to be fun in some way, and be geocaching related in some way.
• Please leave all clues/items where found so that other competitors can participate.
• Must be at the Event Cache (Milagro's Coffee) by 3:00 in order to qualify for prizes.
• The Geocacher with the most points gets to chose the first prize (one of the prizes is the Lab-cache completion code). 

Scavenger Hunt Tasks

1. [4 points] Where is this picture? Figure out where this picture is in Las Cruces, then visit the location. Search for a discretely placed note tied to a rock with yellow yarn, which will have a Verification Code written on it. 



Picture Challenge 1

2. [10 points]Dodecaflexagon puzzle. Go to N 32 18.295 W 106 45.245 where you will find a small cache-container containing a dodecahexaflexagon. Each of the twelve sides contains a clue. Find each side and solve the puzzle to get the correct Verification Code.
3. [4 points] The GCCODE for the I <3 Geocaching in Las Cruces Event is GC4Y8BP. Find these letters on Billboards and take a picture of each. Verification of your pictures will be at the event.
4. [2 points] Are you a cacher that enjoys finding evil nanos? Then go to N 32 18.960 W 106 46.794 and search out the magnetic nano hidden there. Verification code is inside.
5. [3 points] Whole Enchilada challenge: Take a picture of yourself eating enchiladas for lunch. Red or green, it doesn't matter, but I'm sure you can find some good enchiladas in town.
6. [7 points] Find and pick up 3 trackables (travel-bugs or geocoins) from geocaches in Las Cruces and bring to the event. Trackables must be found during the Scavenger Hunt, not brought from home or already in your inventory. Verification will be at the event.
7. [3 points] Take a picture of a travel bug next to a real live bug!
8. [4 points] Cachemobile Challenge: Everyone knows that Jeeps make great cachemobiles. For this challenge take a picture of 4 Jeeps, one of each color of the geocaching Logo, Yellow, Green, Blue and Red.
9. [7 points] Climb a rock! Scramble up to the rocks at N 32 17.803 W 106 36.586. Once there find an out-of-place smooth rock. A verification code can be found on the bottom of this rock. Terrain level is around a 4 for this task.
10. [5 points] Plant identification challenge. This is a multi starting at N 32 19.323 W 106 43.265, At those coordinates you will find a yellow piece of yarn tied to a plant, with coordinates to the next stage. Each stage you are looking for a piece of yellow yarn tied to a different sort of plant. Identify the kind of plant (common name) at each location as verification that you completed the task. This will give you a nice walk through the desert visiting some of the Chihuahuan Flora that typifies Las Cruces.
    
    

Hexaflexagon puzzle

I discovered flexagons fairly recently and find them fascinating. So I did what any self-respecting geocacher does, made a puzzle cache out of them, HEX FLEX VEX.

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...

Killing the In-Laws

My wife's folks are visiting and asked to go hiking this past weekend. They've visited us many times here in Las Cruces, and we've taken them on the best easy hikes already. So I had to think hard about where I could take them that would be both new and exciting, but also a reasonable hike for their abilities. One idea that sprung to mind came from reading a blog post from Southern New Mexico Explorer. I love this guy's blog, he is an avid explorer of the area and if he posts about somewhere I haven't been, I usually make an effort to check it out. He recently posted about a slot canyon near an abandoned ranch by Broad Canyon, (LINK). I remembered taking the kids hiking there to find a geocache last year, but we hadn't actually gone into the slot canyon. It has easy access, and looked to be really spectacular, so that was our Saturday destination. Turns out it was a perfect hike for the family. We even tagged the geocache on top of the mesa again.

Slot canyon fun

For Sunday though, they wanted something a nit longer and more challenging. I had recently done some hiking in the canyons east of Alamogordo, which have some really spectacular terrain that I know they've never seen before. But I was a bit worried that these canyons would be too difficult. None of them have good or short trails, and they all seem to have some pretty significant obstacles. I did some internet research and settled on what I hoped would be doable, the Southern Portion of Ortega Canyon with a goal of reaching the Oasis End Geocache. See that log. It almost did my in-laws in, with several difficult waterfall obstacles, tough boulder hopping and hardly any easy walking. When we got home, my mother-in-law was in obvious pain, lying on the cache an nursing a beer. All through dinner she appeared to be suffering. I hope there is no serious harm done. The canyon was indeed a fantastic hike, but a bit much, Oh well, lesson learned... maybe.

Oasis End