Exploring the Cerillos Hills and finding treasure

A couple days ago, while the in-laws were still here visiting for the holidays, we drove down to Cerillos Hills State Park to explore a new area with them. While there we started the multi-cache, GCJ4WQ, but after finding the last re-director stage, realized that the final was a further hike than anyone was willing to do. The area was pretty neat though, and perfect for winter hiking, so I was determined to come back. I got that opportunity pretty soon, the kids and I had to take off and leave my wife free to do some work at home, so I planned a day-trip back to the area with the kids, this time with a focus on geocaching. We stopped at several caches along the Turquoise Trail, State Highway NM 14. We were pleasnatly surprised that a bunch of these roadside caches weren't the typical tiny micro cache, but actually something large enough that they contained toys for the kids to trade.

In the town of Cerillos, the cache GCVEJ9 brought us to a cool spot with a small petting zoo. This spot ended up being one of the highlights of the day for the kids.

In one of the other caches in town, there were some pieces of real local turquoise, and the kids thought this was amazing. We definitely traded for a piece and my daughter now keeps it with her other treasures. Our hike brought us into the low hills and mines around the town. The trails were very kid friendly, and the cache was in excellent shape.

Abandoned mine in Cerillos Hills SP

Ada with her piece of Turquoise

Turquoise Treasure!

Ada near one of our cache finds

One of the deeper abandoned mines we encountered

 This cache (GC4WQ) had a Haiku theme, encouraging finders to write a haiku in the logbook. I came up with something that I thought sounded poetic, but probably is pretty silly sounding. But one particular log caught our attention and is now one of the kids favorite poems. It goes like this:

Snake snake snake snake snake 

I don't want to see a snake

OMG Hiss Hiss 

 It felt really nice to spend the day out caching with the kids. We used to do this kind of outing quite a bit but recently it seems that I do most of my geocaching trips on my own (and with rugged hikes). Maybe a combination of the kdis losing interest in geocaching, or rather having more interest in things like Pokemon GO. Regardless, we all enjoyed the day and I think we'll be doing more of these trips in the future.