Bulldog Canyon spring flora

Some of the color we saw in the desert yesterday.

There is absolutely no way to capture the true color and vibrancy contrasting the desert surrounding them, but thought I'd blog these poor representations of the real deal anyway.

Caching Going to a New Level

Karl and I started geocaching last fall.  Karl came home from Pathfinder Club meeting saying the group had completed their Geocaching Honor in one afternoon. Since I had been completing requirements for some of the newer honors, I looked it up.  It looked so easy, and since Karl had yet to do his field work, we decided to pick up a few caches in our area to complete the honor requirements....and we were hooked.

Yesterday was our 47th day in a daily cashing run.  Deciding to get the oldest cache in the state, which is also one of the 10 oldest in the USA, we headed out with permit and lock combination in hand for the Bulldog Canyon wilderness area southeast of the city.

Rock Art viewed several miles before Bulldog Canyon

The old cache was practically the easiest thing we wound up doing all day. 

Adding a Travel Bug to Geocache set September 2000

The spring flowering in the desert contributed to our pleasure. But most of our time was spent scrambling up/down rocks.  One of the easier caches was called 31 Arms in reference to this cactus near by.  I love the fact that Four Peaks shows in the background.

31 Arms

Starting up one of the peaks

The largest challenge of the day we took on rather late, climbing up a peak that got steeper and rougher as we went.  We had no idea the coordinates would be all the way at the peak, we would have never have attempted it, if we had known.  It took an hour to climb and by that time the sun had set.  Far off in the distance we could see the 7:00 pm water show at Fountain Hills ten miles away to the NW.  The thought of going down the mountain scared me most of the way up... but it really didn't turn out too badly. Doing most of it either on my butt or backwards with Karl telling me where to put my hand or foo,t I managed with only a few slippy slide falls on loose rock.  Karl followed the GPS track we had made on the way up so we didn't have to worry about getting off on some isolated ledge and having to back track.  As long as we just concentrated on getting over the rocks illuminated by our head lamps we did okay. 

That is one adventure neither of us plan on ever doing remotely like again! Both of us are rather sore and stiff today and I'm actually doing a little hobbling. But it is kind of neat that we manage to accomplish it.