Mora County Challenge

I can't recall exactly how this idea got in my head, but somehow I felt the urge to try to find every active geocache in Mora County NM. Mora county isn't exactly my home county, it's a few hours away, but I think I got the idea while looking for archived caches in project-gc.com. You used to be able to do searches in that site to reveal the locations of every archived cache in a specific county, and I like to do this in remote areas I would be visiting, partially to get the coords and look for the old caches, but also partly to see where interesting spots used to ahve geocaches but are no longer listed. You can't do this anymore (at least that I know) but while doing this some time in the past I noticed that there are a few counties in NM with not that many geocaches in them. ONe in particular, Mora County, only had around 40 active caches and this was a low enough number where I thought you could make a play to find each and every one. My home county, Santa Fe, has well over a thousand, and I very much doubt I will ever find every single one. But this Mora county challenge intrigued me.

When you look at the list of geocaches in Mora County a bit closer, you realize that finding all of them in a day is probably impossible. Despite there only being 44 or so, a handful of these are deep in the Pecos Wilderness and require all day or even multi day outings to reach. But I had already found these caches in my hikes in the Pecos, so most of what was left was along various rural highways. It looked doable but it would be a lot of driving. And what better driving companions could I ask for than my two kids and the dog! We got a fairly early start this morning (7:30) and were off on the challenge!

Wagon Mound Cache

Our first geocaching stop was Watrous, NM, where we picked up 4 pretty easy caches. Next we made a quick find at an I-25 rest-stop (a multi cache, but still quick) before getting off the interstate at a funny little town called Wagon Mound, where we picked upa  couple more caches before heading east, to the far reaches of Mora county, and for our most difficult terrain rated cache. Getting all the way out to the eastern boundary of Mora county was a much longer drive than I had anticipated. This part of the state is prairie, and we ended up in the Kiowa national grassland and the Canadian river canyon. We spent some time looking for a cache just outside Mora county that looked interesting, but that ultimately we couldn't find, GC1RWW4. We then descended down to the canyon bottom. The Canadian river canyon is really pretty, and very remote. Moderate sandstone bluffs surround the canyon. We passed a few cars coming out from the campgrounds, but didn't actually see any people around where we looked. The kids took one look up at the Butte that we would have to climb to reach this cache and decided they would wait in the car and watch me climb it. Which I did with relish... The ascent took a little bit of route-finding and scrambling to reach the summit, but I was rewarded with a great cache, one hidden by my friend Birddroppings. By the time I got back down to the car and the kids, it was well past lunchtime and we were not even half way through our challenge. I was beginning to have my doubts as to our success.

On the Canadian River Butte

The drive back to I-25 took a long time, but we got back to it and proceeded a short ways north to grab one cache up in the northern border of the county, before making an about face and heading back south down I-25 towards Watrous. This time, we stopped to pick up caches on the southbound side of the interstate, of which there were a couple. We exited the interstate at Watrous and went north to Fort Union. This historic site made for a cool stop on our tour of Mora county. There are still a fair amount of standing walls remaining from the old Civil War era fort. The visitor center staff were very friendly, getting us the geocache from behind a closet and giving us some recommendations for seeing the fort. We only did a short walking tour though. The kids didn't want to walk too much, and we also still had a lot of miles and caches to go. We were past the half-way mark, but it was already 3pm.

Fort Union

From Fort Union, we had to back-track south a ways before picking up a small country highway that would take us west and towards the mountains. The landscape slowly changed from prairie, to juniper, to high meadows and pines. We were actually getting close to the town of Mora itself, but we also encountered our first DNFs. Actually a string of them on highway 442 between La Cueva and Ojo Feliz. The first two had some history of DNFs, but the last one was supposed to be an easy find in a juniper tree by a cemetery, but we just couldn't find it. It was also getting later in the afternoon and the kids were showing some signs of road fatigue. Still we kept on north grabbing a cool geocache along a forest road on the northern edge of the county, and also grabbing two caches just outside of the county in extremely picturesque valley called Black lake.

Jaws (GC2K5FD)

More rock art 

After these though, the kids were about done, and I was getting worried that we wouldn't make it back home until well past their bed-time, so we passed by two geocaches near Coyote Creek State Park, and booked it south to the town of Mora. We did stop for one last easy cache there, but there were 3 more caches west of Mora that we opted not to visit due to time. Instead we headed home, only stopping in Las Vegas for some on-the-rd-dinner.

So was it a success? Not entirely. We had started off the day needing to find 30 caches in Mora county. We were able to find 22. Of the eight we missed, three were DNFs and 5 were ones we just didn't have time to get to, not without staying up way past the kids bed-time. Maybe if had been jsut me, and I was really motivated I could ahve at least visited all 30 locations. But with those 3 DNFs, there was no way I could have completed the whole county on this trip. Time to harass some COs to see about maintenance or archival on some of those... ;) As for miles driven... I'm not really sure but we definitely went through a whole tank of gas, so probably around 350 miles. It was a lot of driving but the scenery was well worth it, from the antelope filled prairies, the historic monuments, the alpine lakes and meadows... Mora county had a lot to offer us. We'll be back some day for those last caches!