Pueblo Creek Interpretive Trail

This weekend we went on a treasure hunt to find our first geocache, not too far from home. To get there, we had to find what is now Catron County Road 013, an unpaved county road off of highway 180. It used to be Forest Road 232, is given as Forest Road 232 in the clues, and is marked FR232 on the map I was using, so that was the first part of the challenge. The second part of the challenge was that the road is closed at the Pueblo Creek campground, possibly because of summer rains which caused water to flow over the bridge and may have made it unsafe for cars. The beginning of the Pueblo Creek Interpretive Trail appeared to be on the other side of the closed bridge.

No problem. Using our trusty new Garmin eTrex we marked our location and headed off in what we hoped was the right direction based on our longitude, latitude and elevation, and stumbled shortly on the Interpretive Trail near the far end of the campground. It's a lovely little trail, not too difficult and very well marked - just look for the cone-shaped mounds of rocks. Every once in a while we stopped and determined our latitude and longitude. We were looking for a particular bench described as a landmark, so when we saw a bench, we assumed it was the one we were looking for, and of course it wasn't, and with the sun sinking low in the sky, I thought we'd have to go home and try again another day. The kids were not even remotely interested in giving up, however, so we figured out our position again, found the right landmark, and found the cache.

We sat on a log in the late afternoon sun, looking through the objects left behind by other geocachers, reading all the notes in the logbook and trying to think of something more interesting to say than "We found it!" On the way out we surprised two deer. The car was very quiet as we drove home - everyone comfortably relaxed and tired from hiking through the woods, and feeling thoughtful and contemplative. I was thinking about how sublimely funny it was that I should be scrambling around in the beautiful woods, in nature, using sophisticated technology to find a plastic man-made object holding cryptic little messages and tokens from my fellow man, and deriving so much pleasure from it. Can't wait to do it again.