Weekend GeoCaching

I just have to tell you about our latest family fun pasttime. It's called geocaching. There's a website called geocaching.com that keeps track of caches that people stash all over the place. Some right in town, and some out in the mountains... all over. You can get online, download the coordinates of the caches you'd like to visit onto a GPS, and then you go out on a treasure hunt! The caches are usually small tupperware containers or metal ammo containers and they have all kinds of small trinkets or toys inside of them. We then take along our own collection of items to trade. Once you find the cache, you trade an item, sign the logbook, and put the cache back. The funnest things to find in them are trackable items.... some are coins, some are little dogtags called travel bugs... you can get on the website, type in the tracking #, and see how far the items have travelled, where they've been, and most importantly where the original owner wants them to go. We then report on the website that we visited a cache and that we picked up a trackable item and we'll report again when we've stashed the item in another cache to send it along its way to it's goal. We picked up one yesterday called "take me to your leader". It's a little alien toy attached to the dogtag with the tracking # on it. It's goal is to make it all the way to Washington DC and if at all possible would like to be stashed in caches that are either in state capitals or county seats or other places where "leaders" can be found along the way... cute idea. Alth0ugh we picked it up in the middle of nowhere on a stretch of slick rock in between Cedar City and St. George... nowhere near any leaders. We are going to put together a couple of our own caches. We'd like to put one on West Mountain above Richfield, and maybe one on Lee's Pass up in Kolob Canyon that's a little memorial cache to John D. Lee. Anyway, we're having a blast. Thought I'd share a couple of pictures.