Power Cachin' in San Angelo

I've been so busy lately with work that everything else has suffered, my precious video gaming time, my reading, my internet cruising, even this brand new blog! But the weekend before last I pulled myself away from all that for a day of Power Caching! What is Power Caching? It's when you go hunt geocaches along a road or trail that are spaced close together allowing you to find a lot of them in a short period of time. Now I prefer a cache at the end of a long rewarding hike as much as the next person, but when it's 103F getting in the car with A/C blasting is pretty nice too.

A geocacher by the name of Mommio in the San Angelo area has created a trail of 50 geocaches she calls the "Toe Nail Trail" after the road they are placed along. They very in type and difficulty and are very creative and fun hunts. We hit this trail as part of an event she organized to mark the release of these new caches. There were about 20 cachers on the road and throughout the day we ran in to many of them and spent time chatting.

The end of the day results for my wife and I were:

• 42/50 caches found


• 14 First to Finds (FTFs)


• 7 Ticks (Blech!)


• 2 Flocks of Wild Turkeys


• 2 Door Prizes (Most finds, and finding the magic chestnut)


• 0 Snakes seen (Someone else saw a huge rattler)


• And many, MANY dead deer on the sides of the road.

My wife and I now describe the section of highway between Midland and San Angelo as Deer Alley because we drove home after dark and saw no less than 50 deer grazing on the shoulders of the highway, we slowed down to 50 MPH or such but other drivers were blowing past us. No doubt the reason for all the dead deer on the shoulders. It was a warm, ok hot day, but the challenge was fun, the competition was fierce, and we enjoyed every* minute of it.

*Note: + Wife did not "enjoy every minute" of waking up at 5:30AM on a Saturday :P