Wednesday, October 25, 2017

We are staying longer in Alamogordo to do more caching, and today we tackled the 100 caches in a one square mile.  They are laid out east to west with ten caches in a row.  We tried to go from cache to cache (at least the required 528 feet apart), but the terrain didn't allow us to do that.  In 6.3 miles we found 40 caches and had one that we think was washed away with recent rains.  There wasn't much sign of life out there, except for the desert plants, creosote and catclaw bushes.  You learn in a hurry, which one to stay away from.  We rerouted several times to get over, around or through washes that were quite deep, so that added to our difficulty of trying to stay in a straight line!  We did see an Agave plant mangled, and we think it was a javelina that had just eaten it.  It looked pretty fresh.  We saw one lizard and no snakes!  This was definitely desert, but I have never seen so many rocks in one area as we saw today!

All of the caches were hidden under rocks, so how hard does it look to you, to find them?  We did see that there was a pattern to what this cache owner did, so we got wise to that right away.  A few of them gave us a hard time to find, but we felt good at the end of the day.

All the caches were preform tubes, so they were all nice and dry.  It doesn't rain out here very often, but it did rain last Wed.  As you can see, we are prepared for the sun.  Long sleeved cotton shirt, jeans, wide brimmed hat, and I even wore my visor!  Of course, we put sun tan lotion on and carried our water pack on our back. We'll sleep good tonight!

We were caching in the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains.  The closer to the mountain that we got, the more treacherous the terrain.  We kept our eyes on the three domes that you see here.  Nice backdrop.  I think we will do something less strenuous tomorrow, and possibly go back out Friday.