so after the bike riding/geocaching adventure in the morning kevin and i stayed in out of the heat staying cool with kc & dexter (season 1). hurricane earl was headed our way so by the time steph got home at 4 it had cooled down quite a bit outside. steph asked if i wanted to go hiking, and i was planning on hitting mt. apatite soon anyway so i was in! what surprised me though was that kevin was in as well! so the three of us went up in search of 11 caches, GC1VD47, GC1VD3N, GC1VD4Q, GC1VD52, GC1VD5J, GCHXNY, GC1VD5D, GC13NRQ, GC1VD5A, GC1CWY9, and GC1V25H. it was a 3 mile loop and took us about two hours from start to finish.
most were micros but the first two we found were small/regular sized so had some tradable items in them! in the first cache, GC1VD47, we left the small compass in exchange for a small tupperware key chain.there was a red carabiner in the second one and kevin was just talking the other day about how he needed a new one. so we switched his green one for the red one in GC1VD3N.
like i said a lot of the others were micros with just the log, but still fun to find anyway! two of them, GC2VD4Q and GC1VD52 were supposed to be "hanging out" but they had both fallen either by the force of nature, animals or humans. on GC1VD52 it actually looked like the hook used to hang the cache up had been broken off.
mt. apatite was so named because of the
mt. apatite was so named because of the
apatite that used to be mined there. other minerals such as feldspar, quartz and mica were also mined for. you can even find trade amounts of garnet and even tourmaline! very cool! one of the 11 that we were searching for, GC1CWY9, gem trackers, was an earthcache. this was the first earthcache i had come to. i don't know about other earthcaches but there wasn't an actual cache per say to go along with this one. it brought you to this great hill where you could actually mine for, and keep, the different gems & minerals as long as you didn't go any deeper than 2 feet. you could log a find for this earth cache by taking the picture of three different minerals and identifying them correctly.
we didn't "mine" for long as it was getting later, but kevin did climb up to the top of the pile and found some cool rocks. also from where i was at the bottom of the mound i was able to spot some heart rocks for mom, including one of all quartz! i had the backpack, so i didn't let kevin bring back the huge piece of quartz he found unless he wanted to carry it himself, he decided to leave it. i would like to go back and mine some more, it would be really cool to find a nice garnet (mom's birthstone) or a nice piece of tourmaline and have it made into a cool piece of jewelry. we weren't able to log this cache as a find as i'm not very familiar with minerals/rocks, even after a geology course in college. but i am willing to go back and try again!because of time constraints--it was getting dark awful quick, and threatening to storm--we didn't get GC13NRQ, GC1VD5D, GCHXNY, or GC1V25H. which isn't too bad, found 6/11, and mt. apatite is close enough that i can go back on my own to find the other caches. should be easiest if i just go the opposite direction that we went today.
we finished up the day with a yummy meal, and a few beers, at our favorite neighborhood sports bar, gipper's.
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