Spring Road Trip Day #1

We left Nederland in the late morning on Saturday, one of our original ideas was to leave Friday night and make the long push down to the ranch after putting in a full day.  We ditched that idea and decided to start our trip in a relaxed way.  Causal cappuccinos from the Giotto and some last minute preparations and we hit the road around 11 am.  My bug round up from earlier in the week had us stopping in Chaffe County outside of Poncha Springs, for a cache and bug drop. One of the 10 bugs I picked up was heading to St Elmo, an old Ghost town near there.  We dropped it at the OldNo7 Tailgatin’ and Fishin’ Cache for the next person to move it along.

When we got down into the San Luis Valley we had some mixed weather.  Just before we rolled into Alamosa we spied this “Water-Fall”.  The San Luis Valley is one of the bigger and flatter places on the planet so water falls are pretty much limited to this kind.  (You can click on these images for a larger view)

San Luis Waterfall-----a.k.a. Sky waterfalls

We got to the cabin late in the afternoon and had a bit of dinner, it was nice to see that all of the snow on the ground was gone.  When I was there with the girls for spring break we still had quite a bit.  When we left Ned we still had 3 foot drifts in the yard and were looking forward to desert time in warmth and sunshine.  We hope to be back to the cabin for Memorial day to get some work done, I’ve got some more T&G ready and I need to get the metal roofing up on the woodshed.  The tar-paper has taken a beating through the winter.

We had a nice little hike down our canyon and around the west side of the ranch, the ATV road was dry and clear and the doggies had a great time.

Hiking at the Ranch

We grabbed the necessary items from the cabin to complete the camping inventory (Camp stove and camp kitchen, Portable toilet, etc)  and we started the next leg of our journey.  While loading up we got a visit from some chilly weather and it reminded us of why we were heading to the desert.

Yes...that is snow, Lets head for the desert!

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Two New National Parks to my “Life List”

Tori and I got back from our Spring Road Trip on Tuesday.  We covered just over 2000 miles and got to see some great country.  We arrived home to overcast skies and the forecast for more snow…Snow we thought, how can that be?  …  it’s the middle of May and we just left sunny desert skies in t-shirts and shorts!  Wednesday morning we woke to 10″ or so and I had to reluctantly drag the snow-blower out of storage to tackle the driveway.

Thursday I grabbed this pic on the way to a client near Jamestown….If you did not know any better it could be January or February.  Today we woke to clear blue skies with the hope that our old friend the sun will kick some winter butt….However, clouds moved in by late afternoon and we had some more snow…which has just now turned to rain.

Life at 8500 feet in the Rockies---May 13 2010

I had hoped to post many blog entries on the trip via some hot Wi-Fi spots, but we preferred to be in the wilderness.  We did gab a quick bite for breakfast and checked brief email In Springdale outside of Zion about midway through our trip, but that was it.  As I can squeeze in the entries now I’ll recap the highlights of our trip over the next few days /weeks.

The Two new National parks for me were Zion and Bryce Canyon…eye candy for any Photographer.  Tori can claim those plus the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley,  Capital Reef NP, Escalante – Grand-Staircase NM, and Goblin Valley SP…back in CO we also hit Rifle Falls SP which was new to both of us as well.

Stay tuned for the adventures.

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Travel Bug Round-up

On May 2nd 2000, geocaching was made possible when selective availability was removed from the GPS Satellite signals.  The first geocache was placed on the very next day. Now, over one million active geocaches later, geocachers worldwide are celebrating ten years of geocaching! ______________________________________________________________________

In preparation for our up coming road trip, which will involve some great geocaching, I nabbed some travel bugs from some nearby caches.  I feel that bugs like to travel more 10 to 20 miles at a time.  This is what I have in the cache bag at the moment.

Travel Bugs Waiting to be Released

I first joined the Geocaching Comunity on March 15 of 2001, which if I read my ID correctly puts me at #5979 or one of the first 6000 people who signed up, not sure what the number of users are now but I’m thinking its at least into the Million + range.

There is a guy here in Colorado who has over 22,000 finds and is a bit of a legend, he is ranked 5th in the world for the number of finds he has.  He joined 8 months AFTER I did…Obviously he has been more active and crushes my 237 finds, he has probably done that in just a few days…but I can say I have been doing it longer.

I got our first cache on April 8, 2001.  One of the reasons I was not active early on was due to the manual entry that was required for each set of coordinates…that really sucked.  Now I just click a link and the coordinates and the description and logs will be uploaded to my GPS….Its called paperless caching and it ROCKS.

I might grab a few more bugs tomorrow as I check out a potential deck job in Westminister, then I’ll spend some time loading up some caches along our route.  Its cool to help bugs reach their goals, of the six bugs I have released, one is on an adventure in New Zealand, one is deep in the arctic circle and the others are MIA, or in someones bag for a LONG time.

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