On The Trail

Ouh! I must be out of shape. When I am breathing hard and my legs are a little tight after a weekend of hiking then I know I am in need of some exercise.

Laura and I did some hiking this weekend to find some geocaches. We did about 12 miles of walking, six of which were through snow.

Saturday we went for a drive about 20 miles west of Missoula. The picture on the right is why I like geocaching so much. These icicles were near a cache we were looking for, and they were up on a cliff which was off the beaten path. We had to hike around to get to the cache and passed by them on the way. While I was taking pictures of the moss and icicles I heard Laura yelling about something so I went to see what was going on.

Whoa! An old railroad tunnel! Sweet! This one was only about 200 feet long, but it was still cool. When I was a senior in college I did some Nebraska Ghost Town research and visited the only railroad tunnel in Nebraska which is located south of Crawford at a ghost town known as Belmont. That tunnel is pictured on the right. It is 800 feet long, and as you can see it is no longer used - it was built in the 1880's and then had some work done around 1920. Anyway, I kind of like checking out the old tunnels and this was a good one to see.

The Nebraska tunnel was not very tall, in fact it was too short for a lot of newer trains. Most of the steam locomotives just barely cleared the tunnel. The tunnel we cached around on Saturday was much taller. It doesn't look very large from the picture of Laura, but see if you can find me in this one.

Did you find me? I blend in with the rocks pretty well. I figured this is where my friend Andy would have gone to look for the geocache so that's where I went too. I should have known better, and Laura found it down below while I was climbing around up above. I look quite small when you look at me crouching down and the distance I would fall to the bottom!

We had a blast caching around the tunnel and checking out the icicles hanging inside as well. I took some pictures of them, but it doesn't show much. The icicles were about 20 feet long and several feet wide. Definitely capable of crushing a person if they fell on them! Anyway, that was one of my favorite places to cache around. When we got home to check out the cache on the internet we discovered that there were Indian writings on the rocks as well, but we didn't see those - I guess we were too captivated by the tunnel.

Yesterday morning was gorgeous. The temperature was almost 40 by 10:00 in the morning so we decided to take a hike in the mountains and find a geocache that required a bit of a hike. We had to hike 3 miles to get to it, which required hiking through the snow the entire way, but it was worth it. We managed to hike the 6 miles in 2 hours and 5 minutes - that is including the time we spent at the cache and took pictures. So we felt pretty good about our hiking and being in shape, however we were feeling it later on when it caught up with us. Like I said though, it was worth it. We only encountered about 4 groups on the trek out to the cache and there was no one around when we arrived. After our six mile hike through the snow we did some caches in town so we didn't have to walk through the snow, however that turned out to be mud we were walking through so we didn't gain much in that case, but we didn't have to hike much more than half a mile to get to the caches so that wasn't so bad either.

We now have 996 caches and really really want to have 1000 by the time we leave for our trip so we are doing everything we can to find some caches nearby. We might have to take a little drive this weekend to find a few more and clear the millennium mark.

Today I plan on heading out for a run and then doing some dishes. We are starting our spring cleaning and we shampooed the carpets Saturday night and they are looking good. That is basically the extent to our spring cleaning, other than organizing our gear in the garage when it warms up. We do a good job of keeping the house clean so we don't have to do much spring cleaning - but I can pretend the dishes are part of the spring cleaning effort.

Time to lace up my running shoes and head out the door. Until again

-=Nolan=-