What a fascinating post! That cemetary is the kind of place I would have wanted to explore. Aren’t you worried about rattlesnakes? Or have I seen too many Western movies?
Hobbies
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On this particular geocache outing Tim, the kids, and I went. We have 2 gps units that we carry and between the two of them we get pretty close to the caches! Nathan is being goofy walking ahead of us (LOL). When I see pictures of the kids and I out doing something it makes me sad that Amanda isn’t able to come with us. Now that she has a FT job she has to stay home when we are out and about doing fun things. We’re going geocaching again this weekend and it will be the first time she will get to go with us!
On this particular night the cache was located on private property. Even though the website said permission was granted to go through the gate, it still felt like trespassing. What a GOREGOUS view behind the property. Nathan and I didn’t venture down to the river below and you’ll see why in the next picture (LOL)! We stayed up above with one of the GPS units getting it programmed for the next cache we hoped to find that night.
Can you tell how far down they had to climb? It was a VERY STEEP climb down to the river and the cache was well hidden underneath that raft. 
They brought the cache box up to Nathan and I so we could see what was inside. Then, Josh ran it back down to the hiding spot. This time he didn’t walk on the switchback path. He climb over the switchback trails and saved himself quite a bit of time, but definitely got a work out. Above, can you see him in the center of the picture!
We also went to another spot this same night. Tim drove us up this little trail where the kids and I had gone exploring awhile ago. Little did we know that we drove right past a hidden cache the first time we went up there. We found our first travel bug at that cache!
My mom and aunt have never been geocaching, in fact, they have never heard of it before other than what we’ve told them. We took them to the second place we went the night before. The one above where we found the travel bug. Here are Emily and my Aunt, Dolores, standing at the top of the hill before heading down to let them locate the cache.
There they go. I gave the boys STRICT instructions to NOT tell them where it was! If you look into the distance in the picture below… way to the back right side of the picture you can see Mammoth Hotsprings.. it’s the white patch that you see just over the hill in the forground and at the base of the mountains in the background. The first time we came to this spot a few weeks ago I wondered if that was Mammoth because I knew the Yellowstone Park boundary was right over in that direction. Later, while driving through the Park we realized that was what we had seen.
They’re looking all over for the cache. They found it, but had Josh dig it out of the tree!
We also took them on another geocaching hunt that day. This one was a two step find. First you had to go to the coordinates listed. We were pretty close when we were at the school and I thought perhaps we would find a football field, school building, or flag pole dedicated to a mother/son. Nope.. .we were still 1/2 a mile away. Then, we came to a research center and I thought FOR SURE we were going to have to go in there and search myriad journals for the information. Nope…. we still had 1/4 of a mile to go. There just aren’t that many places where you can go to find birth and death dates. Yep.. the coordinates led us to……..
an old cemetery at the top of a hill. You couldn’t see the cemetery from the bottom of the hill. I parked on the road and we hiked up to the top. GG and Aunt Dolores decided to wait in the car.
After we got to the top then we saw the cemetery and the ROAD! Next time I’ll know to drive around a little more before we jump out of the car when the gps says we’re CLOSE!
At the cemetery, you had to find the birthdates for a mother and son. It was a little eerie walking around this VERY OLD cemetery. We found some really unique grave sites though.
It was really neat to see the different personalities of the grave sites. Some were quite elaborate and others were very simple.
We eventually found the dates we needed. Those dates were entered into the GPS as the next coordinates which would eventually lead us to the actual cache. The satellites were giving us mixed messages, but eventually we found it.
Actually, Emily found it. This was her FIRST FIND! It was a microcache hidden on the backside of a guard rail right by a post. It was very hard to spot.
Way to go Emily! I think my mom, aunt, and grandma all enjoyed the outing. If nothing else, they went away knowing a little more about geocaching! (LOL).
