Tyler State Park Camping, Hiking, Geocaching

Our time in Texas is beginning to grow short. This week we are headed to Covington to look for a new house, but last weekend we decided to attend a geocaching event at Tyler State Park and do some camping. 

Of course Pandora decided to hog the air mattress, but luckily she also added a little heat because it was quite cold during the nights, especially Friday, as it was misty and drizzling rain when we arrived. By mid evening it had cleared enough to go find a night cache! A night cache is usually along a trail and utilizes some form of fire tack. A reflective push pin that you can stick in a tree branch. When you shine a strong flashlight at it it will glow brightly. 

Saturday we woke up and had breakfast with friends then headed over to the main event which promised a lot of fun outdoor activities. We chose to go on a ranger led nature walk and had a great time. We saw a ton of deer near the end of the hike as well as ample evidence of the wild pig problem they have here. 

Overall it was a great weekend. After a rainy and chilly start the skies cleared and we had great 70 degree weather. Tyler State Park is a great place to camp. They have newly redone bath houses and the animal life in the park is diverse and plentiful. Well worth a visit and right off the I20 corridor. 

Caching Down to San Anton.....io

I've been working on two Geocaching challenges lately, one is the Texas County Challenge which is a long term goal and would be amazing to accomplish. To complete it you need to find a cache in all 254 counties which equates to several thousand miles of total driving I suspect. After this past weekend's trip I sit at 114 counties completed. The counties we visited this time were Val Verde, Edwards, Kinney, Real, Uvalde, Bandera, and Medina.

This is also the second year for the Texas State Parks Challenge which hides caches at most of the Texas State Parks and administrated areas. We visited Seminole Canyon and Garner State Parks, and Hill Country Preservation Area on this trip.

In Seminole we hiked the Rim Trail and the Windmill Trail which give great views of the canyon. Unfortunately our timetable did not allow us to stay for the ranger led tour of the pictographs but I would like to visit again for that experience. Seminole is not a large park in terms of the paved "tourist" area but with miles and miles of back country trails to the Rio Grande, it is worth the visit even in the remote location. It appeared to have very nice RV and tent pads.

I am told Garner State Park is best known for its access to the Frio River, and that in summer months it can be so busy that they actually close the gate to hold attendance to a certain number. Even on a cool winter day the river was very active with families fishing in the dam pools. We hiked up one of the cave trails and the terrain surprised me as it quickly becomes a matter of finding foot holds and climbing up steep limestone ledges. Which are also the reason for the great caves found in this area. They have a mountain (hill) named Baldy which looked like it would have one heck of a vista, we even saw tiny dots of hikers up there, but once again that is a hike for another day.

The last area was Hill Country Preservation Area. I was amazed at how large this area was and it is so tucked away that you really have to be looking for it to know it is there. But once you arrive, you find an area very much designed for both hikers and equestrians. The horse trails and ranch were very popular when we were there. Also even though we seemed fairly isolated when driving down the parks roads we arrived to a hiker parking lot with twenty cars in it! People were dressed in trail running outfits that looked as if they were in a city park for a short jog, but where could they be from? There are no large towns nearby so this secret seems to be out that Hill Country is a fantastic place for a day trip hike. There are also many back country camp sites and primitive sites for camping. One funny thing we noted in the area is that the locals seem to be trying to put a run on the local coyote population. We saw many fences decorated like the one below. A strange habit.

Sunday we took it a little more easy and visited the San Antonio Zoo. This was my first time and I was impressed by the presentation and condition of the facility, especially considering it will celebrated its 100th anniversary in March of 2014.

There is already construction under way for a large new area to celebrate the centennial but the rest of the park shows that they are constantly working to maintain and improve the living conditions of the animals and the way visitors interact with them. The animals seemed very happy in their enclosures and the staff was very helpful in interpreting the exhibits. I can't wait to visit again.

10th Annual Texas Challenge - Ray Roberts State Park

N 33° 22.811 W 097° 01.973

From the event page: For 10 years, the Texas Challenge has become THE annual geocaching social event of the state of Texas. The contest itself has grown into a weekend of activities for both people wishing to participate in the challenge and those people who wish to only casually attend! Last year’s attendance was over 300 people! 

The 10th Annual Texas Challenge MEGA coin

The West Texas team began planning our trip to the Dallas Fort Worth area around the first of the year. Very few of us had ever attended a Texas Challenge before so we were going mainly on the rumors and chit-chat we had heard from past attendees and speculation as to what to expect. Being the smallest team registered with only about 30 Challengers we knew we had an uphill battle ahead of us. Also, as if that was not enough the weather forecast appeared to be going south as we approached the weekend. Regardless, we saddled up and made a wet drive over six hours to Denton, Texas just north of DFW. Along the way we found a few caches, ate some great burgers at Red Robin in Abilene and hoped for a break in the rain.


Friday night we arrived in Denton to moist ground and drizzling rain. We checked in at our hotel (thank goodness we didn't plan to camp) and drove to the park for a Friday night icebreaker and early registration. The park was already busy with cachers, there were swag bags, tee-shirts, vendors, and best of all.... FREE dutch oven cooked cobblers in all kinds of flavors. Definitely high on my list in the cold weather. The hosts were kind enough to cook burgers for us all and we socialized with old friends and made many new ones. As the evening ended, we drove back to our hotel still hoping for less rain and warmer temps.

Sunset over Lake Ray Roberts

The next morning we awoke early and had some breakfast in the hotel before driving out to the park. The rain was absent and the ground had dried somewhat which was very good. I had elected to get a breakfast ticket for that morning but in the end I was glad I had eaten at the hotel. Our team assembled under one of the many picnic pavilions and began to discuss strategy. At 9AM our leader Travis was given a USB stick with coordinates to 120 unpublished geocaches hidden throughout the park. They ranged in difficulty and terrain, from a container under a tree, to climbing a tree, to swimming out to an island )no one on our team was that brave). There were also Mystery Caches that involved doing tasks like darts, and disk golf. We were all given scorecards to track our finds and at 10AM sharp the flood gates opened and we spread out to divide and conquer. 

Tools of the Geocaching trade

Travis and I started in the northern section of the park. We quickly racked up four First to Finds (FTFs) before meeting all the other cachers that had the same idea as us. Luckily, one of those FTFs were scooped from another team that missed locating the cache. In each of these virgin containers we found FTF Pathtags which are very nice little metal coins minted just for this event. Our biggest mistake came next when we decided to stick to the trails and hoof it down to the southern unit of the park. Despite only being 1 mile as the crow flies, it ended up being over two miles on a horse trail with very sandy soil. Also, about the time we entered in the trail the rain started again. At first it was a very light mist, but soon enough there was a steady downfall leaking into all our clothes and gear. Undeterred, we continued, and climbed a tree or two with shoes quickly becoming blister-creating buckets of water. After 15 finds and a few misses we made our way out of the thick to the nearest First Aid point where we could turn in our scorecard. Unfortunately West Texas finished last this year when the scores were tabulated, but despite the rain and cold I think everyone had a good time... well as good a time as you could have in 44F weather with rain and mud and wind :P

Just a few of the braze souls who made it through the storm

Sunday morning we met back up at the park to eat some breakfast burritos and pick up litter all around the area we occupied for our event. Many bags of trash were collected and very little of it was created by geocachers I am proud to say. We always like to leave things better than we found them. After this CITO event we gathered up everything and made the long drive back to Midland. Since it was day light savings we lost an hour of sleep, but luckily the rain finally broke!

The slightly soggy remains of the West Texas Team - Post event

For a geocaching event to be considered a Mega Event over 500 geocachers must attend, these events take loads of organization and are few and far between. Almost 800 people had posted their intent to come to Ray Roberts State Park March 9-11, 2012. In the end terrible rainy weather reduced the total to just 575 fearless rain-loving crazy people.

Carlsbad Caverns: Easter Weekend 2011 Part I

Friday we left out of Midland around 9AM, the drive is pretty dull, much like Kansas back when we drove from Colorado to Alabama during Grad School. I stopped a few times to grab caches in Andrews and Lea Counties for the Permian Basin County Challenge (GC2MX53). We arrived around lunch to find the Visitor Center very active which wasn't unexpected. It was National Parks weekend, which meant no entry fees were collected in any of the National Parks. Several bus loads of elementary school children were there along with hundreds of other tourists. We opted for the Natural Entrance hike to get the full cave experience so we got our free tickets and out we went.

The trail into the cave is pretty steep but it is all down hill so as long as you have good shoes (and knees) it isn't too strenuous. There are bats and cave swallows that inhabit the sunlit zone of the cave so there is some smell of guano at first but this quickly goes away. We took our time and let the quicker visitors scoot past. Once you leave the Bat Cave and enter the Twilight Zone the cave temperature drops to the mid-50s with 95% humidity which feels great after leaving the desert above where it was in the high 80s. We didn't get to watch the bat flight today but that is something I would love to see on another trip! There are so many things to see in the cave, limestone is just amazing stuff when it comes to building these natural works of architecture. I like the way the path meanders with the natural flow of the cave and there are few places you see direct tunneling (dynamite drill hole scars).


Along this path you will see several lighted informational signs that give you the answers to this Earthcache (GC1HGBP).There are even places where the old wooden scaffolding can be seen from the 1920s when the caves were explored and the park was developed. Once we reached the bottom of the cave we walked the entire Great Room with even more formations to see. There is a Virtual Cache to be logged here if you follow the Great Room path accessible from either the Natural Entrance or the Elevator (GC8F21)


Finally we reached the elevator shaft that serves as the only exit to the cave, which descends more than 750 ft. We were disappointed to find that they seem to no longer serve Cave Burgers in the underground concession as the old weathered billboards on the way in to Carlsbad advertised, but we found them in the Visitor Center back at the surface and they were tasty after almost 3 miles of walking! We left the main part of the park and visited the much more serene Rattlesnake Springs. Despite the name it is an oasis in the desert that was bought by the Park Service to provide water for the Carlsbad Caverns VC which can be seen about 6 miles away on a ridge line. The lake here is full of minnows and we saw several Birders walking along the road when we drove back to it to get this Virtual cache (GC6D5C). Well worth the short drive from the busy main part of the park, it would be a great place for a picnic lunch.