Thursday, March 19, 2015

Geocaching In The Valley of Fire

In the continuing story of my adventures during The Great Scavenger Meetup in Las Vegas and the surrounding area, we finally get to the point where my worlds collide.

Those worlds being my photographer friends (aka: Scavengers), and my love of geocaching.

When we planned the trip to check out the sunrise at the Valley Of Fire, I offered to drive 3 of the Scavengers to the park.  I warned them ahead of time that after the sunrise, I wanted to do some more hiking and geocaching.  They were all for the hike, but I expected them to be polite and merely wait for me to find the cache when I got to ground zero.  I was, however, pleasantly surprised when they were actively interested in trying out geocaching.

There were two geocaches on the trail, both almost on top of each other.  One being an earth cache, and the other a traditional.  I started off by explaining earth caches, and let them gather the information they required (it was centered around the reasons for the different colours of rocks in the park).  Then I lead them to ground zero for the traditional cache, which was up this rocky slope.


Once we got to the top, I told them what they were looking for, and they spread out to hunt it down.

They quickly zero'd in on the hiding location.
Shortly after that, they had logged their first physical geocache.  The cache was themed after this stone wall that sat nearby, which was part of an old movie set for the film The Professionals - one of many many movies and TV shows that were shot in the Valley Of Fire.
We then continued to hike the rest of the White Dome Trail.

All of the members of our group seemed to enjoy the geocaching experience.  It has already paid off dividends, as an upcoming trip for work is bringing me near one of the Scavengers from this hike, and when I suggested some things to do because of geocaching, she both understood my motivation, and was all for it.

So now I have geocaching friends *and* photography friends, all wrapped up in one neat little package - that is going to make future adventures all the more awesome.