Camping and serving

So several months ago one of the men in CG asked us to help with a Boy Scout Encampment in June. They wanted us to do a geocaching activity for the Varsity scouts. You can imagine this peaked my interest and so we readily agreed. We went to the area in May and picked out places to put our caches. We were told to go across Long Lake from the boat ramp and set up there. So we drove the very primitive road around the lake to the far side and found perfect places for our three - two part caches. Plus a practice cache. I wrote a story with clues for the boys and encrypted the entire thing. They would get the decoder at the first cache and then have to solve to find the second part. We had to do three different caches as there would be three groups on each of the three days that we were there - nine groups in all. So needless to say I had to create three different puzzles and then encrypt each of them. I spent well over ten hours doing all of this. Fast forward to June 1st.

We got to the mountains late afternoon as we had to take one of the scouts with us. After finding a campsite and getting everything set up we made supper. At about eight o'clock it started to get cold. I decided to go into the tent and read a book until bedtime. During the night it got really cold - low 40s and we had to rethink the way we had our bed made.

The next morning it was nice and warm as we were making breakfast in complete contrast to the night before. We got to the lake early to set everything up. It was at this moment that we realized that this lake has two boat ramps. The first ramp - which we didn't notice the last time we were here - made a lot more sense as the correct side as the lake was narrower here. So we drove around the other end of the lake and got to where we knew they would float across in the rafts that they would make. It was also way too far to where we had originally marked our places. The places that would go along with the encrypted clues that I had spent so much time on. So, plan B. We picked out new places and I went ahead and quickly created some math problems then encrypted those. The theme was Book of Mormon- the Power Within so we went with clues like - Take the number of Stripling Soldiers and divide that by 20... We watched the first group build their rafts and paddle over to us. Our cool boys made it across first.

As the other two teams arrived we asked the leaders if they had brought their shoes, or their gps units. They had some shoes, but no gps units. Fortunately we had two so we had the boys with shoes go in two groups and gave them directions on how to locate the caches.

We asked them to tell the raft instructor to tell the groups on the next two days that they needed to bring shoes and their gps units.

After this wild and crazy day we went back to our campsite and grilled a steak and sauteed vegetables with rice. Back in bed by eight as it was getting cold again (for this desert rat). We had noticed the cattle mooing the night before and this night they were even louder. The moon was getting full and the coyotes were also howling, the elk was bugling. It was a long noisy night.

The next day we decided to go do a little geocaching of our own in the area. We found an area with four caches within a short distance in a beautiful canyon area. One of the caches referenced this bridge which was part of the old highway. While I was signing the log, abe was holding the gps and it slipped out of his hand. It only dropped a few feet, but landed just wrong. The screen ended up burned out. This didn't make for a very happy day for him. We went back to our side of the lake and waited for our second group of boys. This group was small and we only sent out two teams again. Most of them had their shoes this time. We loaded up the makings of one of the rafts into our truck and took it around to the other side as it was too windy for them to actually paddle it back. During this adventure we managed to lose one of the center covers of our wheel - not a big thing, but now we are missing two.

Back to our campsite and we noticed that the ranch which was just a mile or so to the east of us must have released some water because we were now close to a stream. To add to our cattle elk coyote serenade we now had frogs croaking.

Thursday morning - our last day. I had left my phone off the entire time hoping that everything was going okay at home. abe told me that he was getting a signal in camp so I decided to go ahead and see if my phone was working. Just as it connected I noticed that I had a voice message. It was work telling me I needed to call the principal to straighten something out. I had to make two phone calls to set everything right. Amazing how the phone worked at just the right time.

When we got to the lake we visited with the raft instructor before going around the lake. The wind was extremely strong and the first try at raft building was not successful. In fact one of the rafts ripped apart as soon as it hit the water and two of the barrels that they were using floated over to us. They finally were able to try something different and made it over to us. This time we had three groups so the third time worked the best.








We ended up at M&S house before we came home and went on a caching adventure there - but that is another long story.