From Boomerville, we signed up for the Escapee’s Geocaching Rally which was about six miles away.  It was another five days of classes, seminars and activities to enhance our Quartzsite experience and learn the in’s and out’s of geocaching.

The game of geocaching is defined by Webster as “a game in which players are given the geographical coordinates of a cache of items which they search for with a GPS device”.

It reminds me of a treasure hunt to find a cache using GPS coordinates, finders sign the log and then electronically record the find.  This can take one to many interesting and  remote areas.  It is a great way to discover an area and the sights around.   We took to this game easily and are enjoying the hunt. The following next two pictures are of the home of the original gold Miner where a Cache is located.

Phil and our friend Bob explored this working gold mine in a remote area (that took a 4×4 to access) while looking for the geocache that is located somewhere on the grounds. 

The rusted tin cans are rumored to be some of General Patton’s secret training unit’s left behinds in the desert.  The cans make a good hiding place for a cache and are of historical significance, not trash.

One of our hunts took us to a remote native petrograph site. We were told that the symbols were painted on using dirt, plants, herbs and saliva. The natives boast that they date back to the 1400s.

Desert transportation.

A parade of toilets. Art gets a quirky in Quartzsite.  This was located at the gold Mine.

Geocaches come in all sorts of containers, big or small.  They can be located almost anywhere.  There are varying degrees of expertise due to terrain difficulty and level of difficulty in finding the cache.  They can be on the ground under a pile of rocks, hanging in a tree, wired to a branch, inside a cactus or magnetically attached to metal along the roadside.

It can be a numbers game trying to get as many as possible or an adventure game finding the hardest hid or the most interestingly hid cache.  Our friends Donna and Bob have over 5000 cache finds!   They have been instrumental in teaches us how to download the technical lists of caches in an area and how to find them using our compass and teaching us geo-sense.

This is a great family game and we hope to share it with our grandchildren.