Good Day For A Geocaching Hike

I live in a town with a lot of outdoors stuff going on. We're JUST below the snow line, in a place that still had a gold mine in operation until 1934. Its since completely flooded, 2 miles deep. 11,000 something feet deep with contaminated mine water. And there's about $6 billion in gold down there at today's prices. Someday they'll pump that out and mine it more. The gold is just too valuable not to. I went for a hike for my first Geocache hunt yesterday. I found this:

Which turned out to have this underneath it. The round thing is a GPS signal bounce. It beeps on a GPS.

Because there are so many outdoors people here, there's 440+ geocaches within about 10 miles of where I live. This was the strong argument to actually pursue the interest. Its EASY to do, lots of people participate in it, its good for kids, and an excuse to hike. So I found myself facing a utility shutoff for neighborhood maintenance today and said: "screw it, I'll go find some of these caches." So I took my GPS with coordinates uploaded and went for a walk. Really nice day. Temps dropped to 61'F overnight, thanks to Delta Breeze ALL the way from the SF Bay, which is 140 miles SW of here. There IS some smoke from a wildfire somewhere. The air is thick with it. Well, not thick. I've seen smoke blue enough that it was visible across the street, and this wasn't that. Its coloring the air, however, and its visible like LA smog. Still, hiking was easy enough and it was just under 80'F at 11:30 this morning so I marched up the hill in search of the nearest cache. I found where it should have been, but it wasn't there. Sad panda.

The next one was about a block away so I marched on, in my Tevas, along the parking lot, and into the next one because: feet go anywhere. This one was ALSO missing, though it was fun narrowing it down. No carrot. Sad panda.

I marched on to the next closest and found a lovely hiking trail worth visiting again, running beside the Nevada Irrigation Distrist (NID) Ditch, which supplies agricultural and drinking water to this part of the county.

I drink that water, after treatment. It was originally brought down the mountain through reservoirs and ditches running on the sides of hills for mining purposes, both hydraulic mining and hard rock for mechanical power generation. The Pelton Wheel was a big thing here.

The Manzanita Grove cache was also missing. I was noticing a pattern at this point. I marched on. Towards Br'er Rabbit's Cache. I looked and looked in the briar patch. I stood over the spot. The exact spot. Nothing. A woman hiking with her 6 yo son asked me what I was doing, so I explained Geocaching. They wished me luck and went on with their walk.

I hiked on down the trail, then realized I was missing the building I needed to reach so found a deer trail and climbed up the hill, in my Tevas. I found a fire road past a grove of wild apple trees, and circumnavigated a fence. I finally hiked up to a weird building I'd been wondering about for years and walked through an unlocked gate to find the OFFICE which houses the geocache behind a door locked with a button to annoy the office lady having lunch. I opted to leave her alone and called that one found. Even though I never actually SAW it.

Hiking back I marched along a dry section of NID Ditch, found some guy talking to a girl with an eyepatch in the woods. They said "hi", I said "hi", very non-threatening but almost certainly homeless. Strangely enough, people don't bother me. Maybe the fanny pack just says "gun" to them. I think I just exude a look of someone going somewhere else and not worth the trouble to mug, or maybe people are mostly nice and mugging is pretty rare up here anyway. The hike back found some trails down and my blood sugar was reasonably low by the time I returned home at 1:30. A seriously long hike. And a really nice day to do it.

In other news I applied for 3 jobs earlier, before the hike. With any luck there will be interviews and I can work again.