Found it in Cave Creek Canyon

Currently have guests in residence at the Painted Pony and one couple Geocaches.  On Saturday while leading another hike up South Fork Canyon in the Chiricahua Mountains we stopped and investigated the location of Trogon's Treasure.  Located up a short trail and near a scenic overlook in the canyon the geocache was discovered by the party of 6 hikers and everyone signed the log after investigating the goodies in the cache.  The location is straight forward and made for a nice warm up to the days hike.

backside of Trogon's Treasure

Trogon's Treasure

Found it, Geocaching near Apache Arizona

A quick trip to Douglas Arizona today and finally remembered to pull the coordinates for the Geocache near the monument to Geronimo and the surrender site.  The geocache, entitled "Geronimo, the last great Apache", was quickly found and from the online logs it appeared in need of maintenance.  A little searching uncovered the lost magnet and the wire used to hold the magnet in place.  Signed the log and replaced pieces that had fallen off, then returned the cache to it's location.  Across the street from the geocache is the monument to Geronimo and his surrender.  The actual surrender site is several miles down a ranch road at the mouth of Skeleton Canyon.  Unfortunately access is restricted but the monument is a rock structure about 20 feet high and is embedded with metates of several different styles (ages).  Below is a desaturated image of the monument with the sun behind the top giving it a glow.

Geronimo Surrender Monument

Found It, Geocaching in the Chiricahua Mountains

Having found the Rodeo, New Mexico geocache and the Silver Peak geocache, and with a couple of free hours another search for a local geocache was started.  After reviewing the map of geocaches in the Chirichua Mountains in southeastern Arizona, 2 seemed straight forward candidates for an afternoon search.  Both caches lay off Forest Service Road 42B, the road from Portal to Paradise, and both were named for the near by town of Paradise, Arizona.  "The Road to Paradise" and "Eternal Paradise" were straight forward discoveries and involved short strolls through the lower elevations of the Chiricahua Mountains.  The Road to Paradise was found next to the road along the base of the ridge that extends north of Limestone Hill.  While Eternal Paradise was just another mile up the road near the Paradise Cemetery.  A stroll through the cemetery was an interesting way to spend a couple of hours and there are some unique markers especially the cast tree limb with a spider web.  The earliest birth date is 1828.  It is interesting to note there is a cattle guard at the entrance to the cemetery, an unusual feature.

Road to Paradise Geocache

Eternal Paradise Geocache

Paradise Cemetery with Cattle Guard

Gifts to the Dead

Geocaching, Found it South of Rodeo New Mexico

Geocaching is described as "a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online."  DiAnn from Mountain Valley Lodge has had visitors stay who were searching for geocaches in the Chiricahua Mountains. With over 1.2 million active geocaches around the world, we decided to follow up on this phenomena and see what caches were in the area.  There is a geocache site just south of Rodeo at the state line entitled One Toke Over the Line.  So I drove over and we headed down to the Arizona New Mexico state line with a GPS in hand and we began our search.  Not wanting to come up dry and miss the site I had peeked at the hint, but trying to apply the hint to the location was unsuccessful and only resulted in crossing the fence line on both sides of the road several times.  So I carefully followed the GPS instead and we eventually located the cache.  We signed the register and looked at all the items previous visitors had left and then replaced the cache in its location.  DiAnn has already started collecting benchmarks (a variant of geocaching) and has located and photographed benchmark number one from the Chiricahua Mountains.  Marker number 1 can be seen at Chiricahua Sky Island, Rodeo.  Note the unique spelling of Chiricahua on the marker.

Below are several photographs of the adventure taken by DiAnn and a list of geocaches in the 88056 zip code may be found here and here you will find the  New Mexico geocaching website.

 The geocache "One Toke Over the Line", south of Rodeo New Mexico.

 The contents of the geocache.

BAlvarius finds the geocache south of Rodeo.