July 15, 2016

• Colorado Springs

  I'm way behind on blogging about our vacation in Colorado. In fact, I think I have the first and last days posted, but nothing in between. After my first day of geocaching in southern Illinois and then driving back up to the St. Louis area, I spent the second day driving across Missouri and picked up Brett at the Kansas City airport. We then drove to central Kansas for the night (with one stop to accidentally climb a hill in the Flint Hills) and made our way to Colorado Springs, with a brief stop in Mingo, Kansas (to find the oldest active geocache in the world) along the way.

  

  We only spent one day in Colorado Springs, but we tried to cram a lot into it. We weren't entirely successful. After checking out of the hotel in the morning, we headed toward the wilderness west of the city. Our goal was to find the oldest cache in Colorado, called Tarryall. The drive took about an hour-and-a-half and there was some lovely scenery along the way. This is a random shot I took out the window of the van as we drove through the boonies.

  

   

  It was the middle of nowhere, but the road was really nice, until suddenly it wasn't. There was a sign that said "Road Damage Ahead" and suddenly there was no road. At least that's what it felt like. We crept down the bumpy track at about 20 mph for what seemed like hours and finally the GPS said we were nearing our destination. That's when we ran into the road construction crew (in the wilderness!) and the barricade (in the boondocks!) and the long line of cars (in the middle of nowhere!) waiting for the pilot car to lead them down the one- lane track, dodging backhoes and other large equipment along the way. We could see where we needed to turn, just on the other side of the barricade, and it was not a pretty sight. It had poured rain the day before and apparently overnight as well. That "road" was a churned up sea of mud and even after a ninety minute drive and a long wait in line behind the barricade, I didn't feel it was worth finding the oldest cache in Colorado if we got stuck in the mud and had to wait several hours for a tow truck to get us out. So we followed the pilot car about eight miles down the remnant of a road that made the other damaged part seem smooth as glass, turned around and followed the line at the other end back through the construction zone and drove an hour-and-a-half back to Colorado Springs.

  Next we visited Garden of the Gods. It was beautiful, but really crowded with cars, bicycles and pedestrians absolutely everywhere. There were no parking spaces left in all but two stops in the park and Brett had to be hyper-vigilant driving because most people there were not exercising the best judgment in their walking, cycling or driving. We really enjoyed the scenery, but the people were like swarms of annoying gnats.

  

  

   

  After Garden of the Gods, we decided to go to the top of Pike's Peak. Had we been thinking, we would have remembered what Pike's Peak looked like from Garden of the Gods and maybe we would have decided that wasn't the best idea.

  

  The top of Pike's Peak was hidden behind that big cloud. As we drove toward the mountain, it started raining. The closer we got to the mountain, the harder it was raining. By the time we got to the part where you pay to drive the rest of the way to the top, it was coming down in torrents. We discussed it and it was unanimous - driving to the top in those conditions was not a good idea. So we turned around and headed back to Colorado Springs. We heard later that they'd had to close the mountain and rescue a few tourists who got stuck in the downpour at the top. I think they also had to close it the next day. So, yay for good decision making. It was frustrating, though, that we'd wimped out at Tarryall, spent the time in Garden of the Gods playing Dodge the Tourist, and been rained out at Pike's Peak.

  I had a couple of geocaches loaded for the trip up the highway to Denver so we wiped the dust of Colorado Springs off our feet and hit the road north. The first cache was about halfway between Colorado Springs and our hotel in Lone Tree (on the south side of Denver). It was called Cache Encounters of the Third Kind. Back when it was placed, there was probably nothing but forest out there. Now there's a high-end housing development with lots of gates and warning signs about security video. There are also bridle trails through the forest and we stopped near one of the trailheads and headed into the woods. It was eerily beautiful. There was a forest fire three years ago and the trees that are still standing are black and have no foliage. There was no underbrush - presumably it burned - but there were millions of tiny white and pink wildflowers growing under the blackened remains of the trees.

  

  We stayed on the bridle trail until it looped around and we realized the cache was somewhere in that sea of flowers. I didn't want to walk through them; they were too pretty to trample! We stepped as carefully as possible and eventually found what we were looking for. At one time, it was a shiny silver spaceship with a glass dome on top and aliens visible inside. It was hovering high overhead with some sort of clever mechanism to lower it. And then one of the most destructive fires in Colorado's history swept through the forest.

  

  The spaceship survived, but it's no longer shiny and silver. The glass dome did not survive the fire, nor did the cable system that it once hung on. Unfortunately, the aliens did not survive, either.

  

  We gave this cache a favorite point for its creativity, its durability and its beautiful location. Our walk through the woods did much to ameliorate the frustrations of the day.

  The next cache was on the outskirts of Denver. We got to ground zero and found an electric pole with a long tube attached to it. There was a screw on the bottom of the tube and when I gently tugged on it, I could feel the resistance of a spring inside. I smiled in delight - the cache was named Pinball. I pulled down on the screw as hard as I could and released it, and the tiny cache popped out of the top of the tube. Brett had to find it in the tall grass of the ditch, and I was really glad he was with me because I could not have reached the top of the tube to replace the cache.

  We got to our hotel and contacted murisopsis and Old Dog Sparky who had already been in Colorado for several days. They met us for dinner at a nearby Chile's and we discussed whether or not we were going to make it to the Midnight Madness event on the capitol steps that night. Brett and I were planning to go, Mark and Val were not. Alas, Eastern time zone kicked in around 10 pm Mountain time and I decided what Brett already knew, to wit, we were not going to make it any further than our bed that night.

  Thus ended our day in Colorado Springs.

  • 6:10 pm
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