Qualifies as a park-n-grab - - - EXCEPT ! - - - for 54 mile drive from civilization in either direction . . . thus T3
PLUS 1 mile of dirt road - follow Hwy Signage for La Vida Mission - immediately south of Chaco Bridge
PLUS no cell or internet service for miles in any direction, Download Before leaving civilization is must !
We come out here as volunteers on regular basis, noted gap in cache distances so decided to fill it in!
Make sure your vehicle is in good working order and bring plenty of fuel and water with you.
There's an old wagon parked beside office but finding horse to pull it & you home may take a while!
Located in the "checkerboard area" around the edges of the Navajo Nation, La Vida is often referred to by locals, and in print, as "The Light on the Hill" both due to it being one of the FEW locations for MANY miles with power (and lights – the only visible for many miles at night) and more figuratively, for the “light” of hope and help provided to the local community.
I grew up here as a kid and was the first 8th grade graduate (50 yrs. ago!) of the school. At that time there was no power or running water and it was a 2 hr. drive to town (once a week!) for food, fuel, mail and water - Yes, we had a hand pump down at the wash, but most “outsiders” could not tolerate the high alkaline sulfur rotten egg taste smell so we fitted a large tank in the back of our supply truck and hauled drinking water from Farmington for the entire staff - adults only - as the locals and us kids were able to tolerate it fairly well. That old hand-dug hand-pumped well still exists and every few years I get a hankering for the taste of the “Good ole’ days” so go down and “have a sip” as the pump still functions! and is still used by the occasional sheep-herder or horseman. Even now it does not taste all that bad, better than some "city" waters I have savored.
Started in 1960 primarily as a clinic and school, medical service was provided by a number of rotating volunteer physician pilots who flew out on a weekly basis into the still maintained dirt airstrip that you will drive alongside to get to the cache. Most came from the Farmington, Aztec, Cortez area, but one flew in from Grand Junction every 4th wk for nearly 20 yrs.! A nurse, educational, dorm and support staff lived on site. Other than an all day one person weekly food, water, mail, & supplies run, each family was allowed one long weekend per month off campus. We always looked forward to that but the roads were PUNISHING and we literally carried a spare front motor mount in our old Ford supply truck and 2 spare tires. The motor mount went out about ever 6 months, often while on the road – a 30 minute fix. Tires? several per month, I know! As a teen I did most of the tire repairs at our mechanic shop, which was made available to the community for emergency repairs, but as it was mostly horse & wagon at the time, there were very few autos in the community. I’m talking the 19-SIXTIES!!!, not the 1800’s! There was a local coal “mine” from which the entire community each dug their own coal, us included, and we heated with pot belly stoves and had a doorless roofless “two hole’r” out back!
NOW! CURRENT DAY! REAL TIME! (There is still NO cell service out there!)
In addition to being one of only about a dozen locations to have power between Crownpoint & Farmington - a distance of 85 miles, La Vida has the ONLY operating water well available to the community. By truck, wagon, car, and horseback they line up at the Community Valve (2” Fire Hydrant) with containers to get water, many with trailers and 1000+ gallon tanks to provide for their livestock. From a 6" well La Vida pumps in excess of 4 million gallons a year of which it is estimated 75% goes to the community - Free of Charge! I observed with total engrossed attention when it was drilled in the late 60’s and was then responsible for it being “reconditioned” with PVC casing (and state mandated meter) when the steel casing rusted out in 2005 – still producing a seemingly limitless supply of the best water for many many miles.
In addition to the long standing primary school, the mission recently instituted a high school program and just this May ‘16 graduated the first two students. Again, along with the clinic, this is the only high school and medical available in that 85 mile stretch of road. A bus comes out of Farmington to the 35 mile point but local parents who wanted a HS education for their kids had to take their kids 20 miles to meet the bus within a 10 minute window on a 2x daily basis. Miss the bus on the return trip? The kid went back to town and was placed with child protective services until you could get the 54 miles and pick them up! Mission students are boarded at the mission (largely due to distances and lack of transportation and fuel) where they are provided clothing and nutritious diet in a small group home family type housing situation.
Also, La Vida, along with the nearby Tsaya Trading post ( Yes, they do still exist! Tsaya was established in the late 1800’s) provides the only mail service in that same stretch with some 300 families getting their mail through just two postal boxes, large BAGS really, several times a week. Mission staff spends hours just sorting mail into our private (free) box system. A Food and Clothing Bank is also operated by the mission as well as emergency medical transportation when needed. Numerous other small services are also provided. Other than a small charge for medications, all services are provided free of charge.
I recently spent a week camping out at the mission working on a 35kw generator that is older than I am and with which I am intimately familiar, having helped my dad transport & install it (donated-used) when I was in my early teens and worked on it numerous time since. I also was doing maintenance on a large RO (reverse osmosis) system that I built years ago which is used to extract the last vestiges of sulfur from our water system so it can be used in our green houses were the mission produces much of its own fresh veggies for use in the school cafeteria. Even though most people can now tolerate the deep well water- some stomachs still rebel - but PLANTS just lay down and DIE.
Although I have not lived at the mission since the early ‘70s, I have a long standing connection with the mission including having classmates, friends and even close “family” (due to an adoption) and after being president for a number of years, resigned in 2013. The current director/president (husband/wife team) are close friends of mine and I was telling them about our (Team kekj) new found obsession with geocaching and they thought it would be a really cool idea to set a cache in the area. On occasion, volunteers have asked about caches in the area but with out cell or internet, it has to be verbal. Coords will lead you to a single small tree on the north side of the church parking lot where you will find a forest foliage camo wrapped bison nestled into a crotch of the tree at about 4’ height. While totally exposed, you have to look carefully with good “Light” to see it. As there is NO CELL SERVICE and only LIMITED SATELLITE ONLY internet service, you MUST download coords and description BEFORE you get out of range.
As you approach the mission you will first see the words “La Vida” in white stones on the hill above the mission. Notice the rugged geological features alongside the nearby Chaco Wash. As kids, I and my brothers have investigated most of it for nearly as far as the eye can see! You should do the same! We found pictographs, hieroglyphs, arrowheads and pottery all around, as well as sharks teeth, dinosaur bones, geodes, perfectly spherical concretions, fossilized shrimp burrows (look it up on google! Looks like corn cobs!), sabre toothed lion tracks, and petrified wood with the bark still perfectly intact (for a good example go by the front of the clinic, or if open, the reception room – my dad did this masonry work using only local native materials) There is a nearby large rock with names of early frontiersmen dated in the early-mid 1800’s. A few years back I went “exploring” on foot for most of the day and most of these items have are long gone due to weathering and/or “outlanders” having picked them up and taken them home, in some cases having used gas powered concrete saws to cut them out of the surrounding stone. It is now illegal to take or deface Native American Artifacts and much of the surrounding land has been bought up by the Navajo Nation so you have to be careful about where you can roam. The mission staff can give you limited advice on where to go but we would highly advise you to check out the Chaco Canyon National Monument and the Earthcaches in the Bisti Badlands – which is where the clinic petrified wood came from – where there used to be complete trees laid out in a row on the ground– now virtually all gone and illegal to do more than look at what remains. ( p.s. shrimp burrows can be found by the hundreds on top of “La Vida Hill” behind the mission, but ask permission to go up first and then just look, don’t take - except photos!)