IntrepidXJ's Adventure Weblog

After being home for only 4 days (all of which I had to work) from my 9 day Colorado Adventure, I headed to northern Utah to spend the weekend at the NAXJA Intermountain Chapter’s Geostash Challenge. I’ve wanted to attend this event the last two years it was held, and finally decided I would drive up for it this year, even if I could not stay longer than a standard weekend (I didn’t want to take any more time off because of my previous week off). For those that are not familiar with this event, it’s basically like a poker run. In order to get your cards you need to find hidden geocaches that you are given the coordinates for. You need to find at least five of the hidden geocaches to get one poker hand. When you get back to camp for the dinner, the hands are analyzed and the best hands win some prizes. Since it’s put on by a Jeep club, the caches are hidden along 4×4 roads with some short hiking required to reach some.

I left right from work Friday and drove the 7 hours to the basecamp near Evanston, WY. I ended up driving through some very strong winds on I-70 between the Cisco and Moab exits, and then ran through a couple more storms after passing over Soldier Summit. Luckily, when I reached camp around midnight, it was not raining, so I quickly got my tent setup and got to sleep.

Once morning arrived, it was raining pretty good. Everyone slowly got up and ready in hopes that the rain would stop, but there was no such luck….it was still raining when we finally decided to head out to find our caches for the day.

After getting our permits and airing down, our large group headed up the bumpy Gold Hill Road to an overlook where the first cache was hidden. On our way, the rain turned into sleet and then into snow. By the time we reached the overlook, the snow was coming down fast and heavy and there was probably an inch accumulated on the ground. The flakes were huge! It certainly didn’t feel like it was the middle of August. It felt like we should be looking for a Christmas tree to cut down After we found the cache near the overlook, I snapped a few photos of the new snowfall, since it might be another few months before I see snow like this again. Unfortunately, because of the storm, there was not much to see from the overlook this day. I had arrived in the dark of the night, and the day so far had been very cloudy and snowy. I had just finished my first trail in the Uintas and still had not been able to see the mountains around me!

Airing Down and getting our permits

Our group as it started to snow pretty heavily

Some more photos of the snow…

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What a great day! Amanda and I woke up early this morning and headed over to McDonald Creek for a little hiking. This is a nice easy hike that starts out near Castle Rocks and then heads down to the Colorado River.

There are also some pictographs along the canyon.

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I added a new page last night to my website here called ‘GeoStats’ These are my current geocaching stats of caches I have found. I’m hoping my geocaching is going to be picking up this year, so keep an eye on those stats, as they are kind of interesting (well, at least to me they are).

You can find the link to the new GeoStats page in the menu bar across the top, or by clicking the link below:

Amanda under Delicate Arch

Having been to Arches National Park a number of times, it was strange that we had never made it over to the most famous arch located there; Delicate Arch. We set out this morning to make the hike to Delicate Arch. Here’s a few photos from our hike.

Wolfe Ranch

Lots of people

Other side of the arch

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Since Amanda and I both had the day off from work, we headed off to do some geocaching around Moab. After finding a few caches on our way there, we had a late lunch at the Moab Brewery and stopped at a bookstore before heading home. Of course, we stopped and found a few more caches on our way home, too

Enjoy some photos from the day!

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Today, Amanda and I headed over to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. While most of the roads weren’t open this time of the year, we did a little hiking around the South Rim.

Gunnison Point Overlook

Unfortunately, it was closed, too…

If you look closely, you can see the Gunnison River below

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Took out my new Garmin Oregon 400t this morning for the first time to see how well it works for geocaching. So far I am very pleased with the performance. The accuracy was good and it was very easy to use when paperless caching.

I wanted to see how the device worked out with the original firmware (version 2.2) so I did not upgrade that part yet. I will probably get around to upgrading it to the latest firmware pretty soon.

It was a bit cold out, so we didn’t stay out too long, but I really think this is going to work out as a great GPS for me I’ll probably write a full review once I get some more field time with the GPS so I can really give it a good workout.

Didn’t take many photos, since I was busy trying out my new GPS, but I did take a few while we were at Eagle Rim Park

Icy Colorado River

Mount Garfield and the Grand Mesa in the background

Colorado National Monument in the background

I finally picked up a new handheld GPS. I had a little bonus on my last paycheck and decided to upgrade my GPS mainly for a better geocaching experience. In the past I have used my Magellan CrossoverGPS and AT&T Tilt for geocaching, but I was never completely satisfied with either solution. The CrossoverGPS required that I also used an old Compaq iPaq PDA for paperless caching, which was a pain. The Tilt worked much better, but the battery life on my phone while using the GPS was really bad.

I ended up getting the new Garmin Oregon 400t and think it will work out much better for me….not only with geocaching, but also for keeping tracks of the trails I explore in my Jeep and on foot. I’ll keep you updated on how well it works out for me

Since Amanda and I have not gone geocaching for a little while, we decided to stick around town and search for some caches today. Unfortunately, we did not find as many as we set out to, because we ran into some rather large crowds near a few of the caches and decided to try again another day on those.

Here’s a few pictures from the day.

We actually found this waterfall less than a mile from our house, too. Right next to the Gunnison River