Geocaching......

I've always wanted to do geocaching with the girls (and Scooter, of course) and when we were meandering around some shops earlier this week, we found a store that rented a little GPS thing for the day. SO on Monday we picked one up and were on our way! We (I was by far the most excited one of our group about this whole adventure) stepped outside the store, turned that baby on and walked about 500 feet to our first cache! We were so excited! So we opened the can, signed the log, took a treasure and left a treasure (if you're ever wondering what to do with all those Happy Meal toys, geocaching is the place to dump them!) and set about finding treasure #2. We were wandering around (thankfully, it was within walking distance from #1) a horse corral and the horse corral people came out to ask what we were looking for. Well, the cache wasn't there - they'd noticed other people recently looking too. So we set about finding #3. We actually had to drive to this one and I was amazed at how "easy" it was to find. Scott and the girls bounded ahead and found it on someone's front lawn in a nice hollowed out tree. I liked that the cache was big: an old ammunition box. We were all excited about it and were ready to set about finding the next one.

Our next cache took us into the forest - down the highway first and then off the pavement onto a primitive road into the forest. I am constantly commenting and am bewildered by the damage from the Rodeo -Chedeski fire that went through this area about 10 years ago. The devastation is still very obvious, yet I am amazed by this: over 1 million acres of forest were burned in the Rodeo-Chedeski fire and the recent Wallow fire combined. Yet as you look into these beautiful White Mountains, they still look untouched. There are still millions of acres of forest up here - I'm not belittling those fires by any means. It is just amazing the vastness of the forest - and how little of it we see. ANYWAY, away we went to find our next cache - walking through the forest that had been burned. Again, we found the ammunition box in a hollowed out stump; we took one, left one, signed the log and explored a little bit.

(notice the sky in these pictures....we were hoping for a big rain storm but only got a few drops here and there. It was raining enough that we couldn't picnic in the forest though)

So away we went for our next adventure after having lunch in the park. In a light rain. While the kids played on the metal park equipment. With thunder in the distance....