This page describes our adventures geocaching. It does contain SPOILERS about the cache sites, both in the descriptions and some of the photos. You have been warned. Click on the thumbnail pictures to see a full-size shot.
3/30 - 4/1/2006
We took a couple of days off and planned to head up to Prescott for some geocaching and a little vacation. Thursday we hit REI again and stocked up on some gear: hats and socks are the only things I can recall. OMG $9 per pair of socks, but they were worth every penny. Those are some comfy socks.
We really want to have a “signature item”, but are still working on ideas. The current idea is to make laminated bookmarks out of pressed gilly flowers, with some text. Flowers take awhile to press, plus all the other material we didn’t have yet, so we decided to do something else for awhile.
But we still wanted to have something nice, and preferably something that we had made. Since REI is near the biggest bead store I’ve ever seen, we headed over there to pick up some bone beads to make pretty black and white bone necklaces. BUT they were all out of the bone discs we were looking for, so we wandered around the store for a couple of hours to find something else to make. We ended up with a combination of bone, semi-precious stone, and glass beads. 
We spent the rest of the day putting necklaces together, and getting the remainder of our gear organized. I don’t think of photographing everything, so no pics of our gear... oh darn, I know. ;)
Waypoints were all uploaded to the Garmin, and the cache pages printed out in a binder. Everything was packed up and we headed out Friday morning.
Our first stop was the Lynx Lake recreation area. We kind of wandered down the road a bit, looking for a Forest Service road that was indicated on a cache printout. We drove past one, but it had a definite “No Parking” sign, so we bypassed it and kept going until we found the official park parking area. I’m glad we did, because we wound up hunting several caches in the area, and would have had to park here anyway. And this way we didn’t have to worry about a ticket, though we had to dig around the car for enough change for the $2.00 use fee. Sorry, Forest Service, for the heavy envelope. :)
It was a fairly chilly day, especially with the near-constant wind in the open areas. The forecast had predicted possible rain that weekend, but fortunately, we never saw any. It was overcast all day Friday though, which was kinda nice.
We geared up and got ready to head out. An older gentleman, who is a caretaker for the area, told us we could see a bald eagle pair flying around the lake. They’ve built a nest on the east side, and the footpath around the lake is closed to keep people from disturbing them. However, we decided to not head to the lake just yet, as we wanted to find some caches in the woods first.
So, with a feeling of setting off on an adventure, we marched back down the road towards a trail system marked on a park map. However, we foolishly left all of our food in the car, as well as our water bottles. What were we thinking? I really can’t remember, but that wasn’t very smart.
Once we got into the trees, and especially headed downhill a bit, the wind cut down considerably. I was still glad to have my jacket as protection against tree branches, though it's definitely not meant for hiking, poor thing.
We were heading for the Lynx Creek cache, and trying to follow the directions on the printout as if we had parked on the service road. As we headed along a trail, I noticed another cache pop up nearby. So we side-tracked to Arizona “Game & Fish” Cache. After a short search, we found it on the back side of a fallen tree. Huzzah! Our very first find :)
AND it was in an ammo can, which I had heard about from geocaching.com, but I hadn’t actually seen one before, so that was cool. It took us a second to figure out how to open it, but it wasn’t too hard. Of course, I forgot to take a picture. I signed the log, and we decided to take a little rubber snake, and left one of our Lobsterita mardi gras necklaces. The cache mostly had things in it aimed at younger folks, and we thought that would be a good match. We picked up our first Travel Bug too - the lovely Fortuna. I also replaced the ziploc bag holding the logbook, since the one in the cache wouldn’t seal. If I’d known better, I would have brought a lot of extra gallon ziplocs, since most of them could have used replacing :(
Then we resumed our interrupted hike to Lynx Creek. On our trek we made a first-time geocaching classic blunder. We left the trail, and made a beeline towards the waypoint. In our defense, we intended to stay on the trails, but the trail map that we had looked like nothing was going to end up where we wanted to be, so we got as close as we could and headed cross-country. In this case, cross-country wound up being a scramble down a drainage thing that emptied into the creek eventually.
It’s been too long since I’ve lived in a wooded area, and I’m forgetting what that would be called. I wouldn’t call it a wash, though maybe that’s what it really is... It wasn’t really a stream; it was just a v-cut into the hill from the water. It was mostly dry when we went through it, with a couple of puddles, but no running water until right at the end. Lots of rocks and stuff to scramble over, so it was interesting going. I definitely didn’t want to try climbing back up that. I thought we took a picture of it, but now I can’t find it.
It eventually flattened out into a little pool in the rocks, fed by a remarkably noisy waterfall. 
There’s no scale in the picture, but it’s a very small waterfall...maybe 3 feet tall. Very loud trickling though. There was some evidence of a fire built here previously, as well as some more trash that we picked up. A lot of it was broken glass though, and I don't like trying to collect it. But we got most of it, I think.
This fed into Lynx Creek, which is a very rocky area. Here’s some pictures of the rocks.
My husband thought the rocks were very interesting. ;)
They were pretty neat, but I wanted to find the cache. We crossed the creek on some rocks, and immediately thought that the hill above was probably the way to go, due to the description on the Lynx Creek cache page. So we climbed the rocks, and looked around a bit. We didn’t see the cache, so we headed down the other side and searched around the base of the rocky area. Still didn’t find it. I sat down to decrypt the hint, which confirmed the location in the rocks. While I poked around the bottom some more, my husband climbed back up the bluff. And, he found it! We had walked right by it the first time through, looking at the view, 
and possible hiding places on the other side of the path.
There were some interesting things in the cache, but what caught our eye was a keychain made from a stick of RAM. So we signed the log, took the keychain, and left one of our bone necklaces. We also removed a broken pen, and a book of matches from a local place. I was a bit nervous about taking the matchbook (ohnoes cache police!), but I remembered reading that matches are kind of a no-no to leave in caches, especially in fire-prone areas.
Fortunately, there was a trail leading out of the creek area. It was a bit of a climb, but in about ten minutes we were back at the parking lot! *sigh* So close and yet so far... we had gone the very longest way around by trying to follow the directions. But if we hadn’t, we might have missed the Game & Fish cache, so it turned out ok.
We took a lunch break, but since it was still so windy, we ate in the car. However, we had an uninvited guest on MY side of course.
I don’t even know if you can see from the picture (none of them came out very well), but it’s a big yellow hornet. He must not have been feeling well because he went and hid in the door hinge, or whatever that is, and would NOT come out. I poked him with a wrapper, nearly hyperventilated trying to blow him out... nothing. He kept peeking out at me though. At least he wasn’t interested in our food. That’s the only problem with picnicking - ya gotta deal with the bugs. ;)
We finished lunch and he still hadn’t left, so we got serious with the poking, and finally knocked him off of the door. Then he crawled under the car, but I didn’t care, because we were leaving on our second jaunt. We remembered to bring a water bottle this time, and headed down to the lake.
to be continued...hopefully before I forget everything