Quincy Lakes Geo-caching

Peteris, Christi and I headed up to Quincy Lakes (out by Vantage) to get in some desert training in preparation for Desert Winds 30 hour Adventure Race in a couple weeks. Peteris made up a nice map that marked several geocaches, and we spent the day wandering around trying to find them, while mountain biking across some rugged desert terrain. Peteris had a GPS watch, which we used several times in order to track down some of the caches, as well as to discover that we had used the wrong datum on the map and that the flags were all slightly off. Once we had worked out the kinks, however, we managed to discover several of the caches just by using the map.

The most ironic geocache was one located amongst a pile of rusty cans. Peteris found a gopher snake sleeping in an old rusty can that he had picked up while looking for the cache, causing him a bit of a startle. When we found the cache, it contained a small plastic snake, a warning perhaps, albeit a few minutes late.

The day was gorgeous the views fantastic. We rode a large bike loop that took us up and down some fairly steep trails, and across a long stretch of scree. We brought our Desert Winds swimming gear along, and we tried it out in Dusty Lake, learning what worked and what didn't. Christi's $1.99 Nemo air mattresses buy from ToysRUs fell solidly in the latter category, as it fizzled out its air and sank. Luckily, we still have some time to find her something workable for the 9km of swimming/kickboarding/coastal orienteering that we will have to do along the shores of Lake Meade on May 2-3.