My 11 year old son and I finally had a dry weekend to go out with our Garmin 60CSX for our first adventure with geocaching. Since I heard about this on New Year's eve, I've purchased a GPSr, read a TON of material at many different sites but have yet to have a weekend to actually try my hand at it.
Today was our day to try. We searched for one in the Petit Jean State Park area, GCHQAZ, around Cedar Falls. The shaded sides of the mountains and trails were still covered in snow. The Falls were beautiful too with the mounds of ice formed at the bottom of the creek falls. The air was wonderful to breath. The trail was not busy at all for a Sunday either. I carried a bag of trash out with me too.
So we found the general area of the cache but just could not find the box. Now the snow could have kept us from seeing what we were looking for – or we could have been so far off.
I felt clueless really. My son said maybe the bluffs were causing the GPSr to cause us to be off track. I wish we could have tried this with a "pro" at this for our first time just to give us a heads up of what goes on when you do this.
We returned home tonight and looked at the hints to find the cache. I said we will have to write those down and try to find it again.
He is really interested in leaving something too. So what kind of things can we leave? I have heard about the geo caching coins but you guys leave other things too – right?
My dad teased me about hiking today using my GPSr – using it for a place I know how to get to! But he was just teasing – he knows that I am doing this for the fun of the hike and for the adventure too.