Backyard discoveries

Yesterday, I went up into Johnson's Pasture again to hide the first stage of Exploring the Technology, the multi-cache the Tadpole and I worked on this weekend. When I got home from work, I noticed that he wasn't home from school yet. When my other son got home about thirty seconds later, I asked him about it and he didn't know anything, so I called the Tadpole. Gotta love technology sometimes. I reminded him about letting me know where he was if he wasn't going to come right home and then asked him if he wanted to help hide the first stage, which he agreed to do, so I went and picked him up.

This was probably one of the best calls about geocaching that I've ever made. Had I headed up the hill without him, I probably would have gone up with the single purpose of hiding the cache, then getting back home and clicking that, "Yes, it's active" button on the cache page so it would go to a reviewer for approval. But, on the way back from the hide, Tadpole noted to me, "You know, we've never gone up that way before." And yes, he was right, because we'd never gone up the trail to the west of us. On the map, it's labeled at B P L Rd. As you can see, it's also bereft of caches. The four caches in a line from left to right are, Pasture-ized, Exploring the Technology, Rusted Gate and Melted Cheese.

I'm really at a loss as to why I've never explored this part of the trail before, but there's all sorts of terrain over on that side that's open for some neat caching. As we walked along the road, we encountered a nice trail that wound its way to the north along a ridge. We walked on that one about a quarter mile and it didn't seem to be petering out at all, so I expect that it would eventually hook up with another fire road to the north of the B P L Rd.

After hiking back out to the main road, we took it further west to another spot overlooking the city below. The possibilites for caching and for hiking were tremendous and I'd never even thought about going that way before. I estimate the trail is about 1.5 miles in length, so roughly 3 miles over and back. And it's all about 2.5 miles away from my house, once again, literally in my own back yard and I hadn't even realized it before yesterday. I owe a debt of gratitude to my son for having the foresight to explore new territory.