Desert Caching

We celebrated National Turkey Sandwich Day by heading out to the desert for some geocaching. Our destination was scenic Box Canyon Road between the south entrance to Joshua Tree and Mecca. To most, this 20-mile scenic drive looks something like this: desert floor surrounded by distant hills and a mountain capped with snow from last night's rain. It's lovely.


But for geocachers, Box Canyon Road looks like this. Each of those little boxes represents a cache. The yellow line is just a section of the road we traveled. There are nearly 60 caches in that picture. That's a lot of caches! With our GPS in hand, we set out to get as many as we could. Upon our arrival in the canyon, we quickly learned our options would be limited.


While Box Canyon Road is paved, the rest of the "roads" are basically just desert, which made any off-road caches off limits to us. Here's P lamenting that we didn't have our trusty jeep Rocky with us on this trip.


We found all of the just-off-the-road caches we could. P was determined to make a quick scramble for this one. In all, we picked up seven caches along the way. Not a bad day for a couple of vacationing geocachers cruising in a Mustang convertible in the desert!

After all that work, we came home and had -- you guessed it -- a turkey sandwich!