We'll convene at 9:30 am and by 10:00 off you go to do caches. Be ready for any kind of surprise, challenge, puzzle, CITO, D5T5 - who knows? Weather could be hot, rainy, windy, high fire danger (hopefully no forest fire - although for the Little Bear Fire we did good - it probably still ranks high in the annals of geocaching), or perfectly calm. But in any case it means hats, sun block, water, hiking shoes or boots and strongly suggest pants and not shorts because you know - right? - I'll have at least one good bushwhack for you, maybe more than one. Well, that's what you get for coming to anything named Billy the Kid...
I don't think you guys'll have to travel all over Lincoln County this time but be ready nonetheless to drive and hike. The meeting spot is a BLM campground Group Shelter. There are a few water and electrical hookups but you can also camp there for free if you don't hookup to the water or electricity. Or you can camp elswhere on the 25,000-acre NCA - you just pull 100 feet of any of the 22 miles of dirt roads and camp. Sunday, if you want to hang around, there are 24 trails trails for hiking, mountainbike riding and horseback. Oh, did I mention? - Saturday you WILL be going on some of those trails. You know what's cool, in the late 60s and early 70s, the the Veterans at Fort Stanton named some of the surrounding hills after features they saw at Gettysburg, such as Little Roundtop and Big Roundtop. You know what else is cool? There's a really great narrow-gauge railroad bed near Capitan. So, hint, hint...(did I mention hiking, long pants and sturdy hiking shoes)? So each time we do a BtK, there is some kind of theme and caches are all based on history or interesting terrain. Let's see, we did the muggle series of caches, and we did Lincoln County War and this and that and, hmmm, haven't figured out the theme yet. Oh well, soon...
Well, the theme is settled - as it's Get Outside Day - that means each cache has to use that acronym for a name "GOD." For instance "Oh God, He's Doing It To Us Again," or "My God, We're Going Down There?!!!" or OMG, You've Got to be Kidding," or perhaps "After This Godforsaken Event We Need to go to the No Scum," and so on...
I think we'll be doing a pot-luck and the campground host and I will likely do the burgers and dogs. Motel-wise, there's the Smokey Bear Motel in nearby Capitan (4 miles away) and all kinds of places in Ruidoso (24 miles). Lincoln (6 miles) has a couple bed and breakfast places. I'll also check on the availability of the BLM Bunkhouse (1 mile) - if there's no other entitiy using it, we have showers and 15 beds there and 2 big refrigerators for holding all that food you'll be bringing.
That's it for now. Check back weekly to see what updates there are.
Hey - let's load up the caches at this event with trackables, so everybody bring 2 or 3 or 5 - a good event to launch them.