Las Vegas Caches
A good way to save some cash in Las Vegas is to look for some cache(s) while you're there. The cash you'll save is the cash you don't gamble away while you're out enjoying the fresh desert air as you search for the abundant Geocaches in the area. There are plenty of them, both in town and in the outlying areas. While we were there recently for a company golf tournament, I snuck away and found two on Friday, May 18th and one on Monday, May 21, 2001. Here are some photos.
May 18, 2001, GC42B, Las Vegas Urban Microcache #1, was the hardest to find of the six caches I've found so far. It's in an urban park, so of necessity must be well hidden. My GPS consistently took me to a spot about 10 to15 feet from where I finally found the cache. The cache is a 35mm film canister with only a sign-up scroll, a quarter and the typical Geocache write-up for accidental finders. The above photo was taken from the parking lot toward the general vicinity of the cache.
May 18, 2001, GC407, Outdoor Nevada #2, Lava Butte, is in the Sunrise Mountain area, easterly of Las Vegas. The cache is in a 5 gallon bucket which is covered with rocks. I removed a few to take the photo on the left. The photo on the right is me standing hear the cache. This one was a hard hike for me because I had running shoes on and I parked too far away (I realized later). I did a lot of cross country scrambling on loose rock and shale to get to the cache. I actually hiked to the top of the ridge behind the cache and had some good views but I was in a hurry and didn't take many photos. I've decided that being in a hurry is not a good thing while cache hunting.
May 21, 2001, GC2E8, Viva Las Vegas #1, is located in the Red Rock National Recreation Area, about 12 miles west of Las Vegas. The area is beautiful and it was a beautiful day and I wasn't in as much of a hurry, so I took more photos. The trail was very nicely maintained with many steeper sections having what amounted to stone stair steps as shown in the middle photo in the top row. This made the ascent a lot easier than it would have been without them. It was still a nice little uphill hike, though.
Top left is looking easterly from the trail about halfway up. Top middle, some of the many stone "stairs" along the trail. Top right is the cache. Middle right is me near the cache. Middle middle is from the top looking toward Las Vegas. I could see the Stratosphere and make out some of the other landmark hotels but you can't see them in the photo unless you use your imagination. Middle right is looking to the valley to the south from the top. Lower left shows the pond at the top and if you look close you can see a couple guys on the rock up above. This gives you an idea of the scale of these big old boulders. Lower right is view from the trail about a third of the way down.
