Life is a Highway

gettin' my kicks on Route 66

It's been a busy time here since I arrived in Mohave Valley. It's in Arizona, but is very close to the borders of both California and Nevada. One day I got caches in all three States.

Shortly after getting here, I noticed that I was close to 3,000 finds so thought I'd target that milestone before my "cacheversary", my first year of caching on Jan. 23. I got to that pretty quickly, and decided that if I really pushed it, I could get to 4,000. I've been boots to the caching trail ever since. With only a week to go, that milestone is now easily in sight, so I'm treating myself to a slow day to catch up on the blog, email, laundry etc.

I spent a couple of days hiking a 200-cache geoart just off old Route 66, with a familiar design:

It was a lot of fun trekking through the desert. It started with a favourite container... an "ammo can", with extra pill bottles to replace any missing en route:

I found several abandoned tortoise shells, reminders of the harsh environment in the desert.

 Since my decision to push for the 4,000 mark I've also done 500 of the 800-long Route 66 power trail (caches every 528 feet or so, right on Route 66). The first 60 or so I did by mountain bike. Most of the time, these were 35 mm film canisters, placed under rock piles (some of which weren't actually easy to spot):

Somebody, perhaps "tired" after doing all 800, left this marker by #800:

I saw some iconic places along the way. The well known Road Runner Retreat is in (still recognizable) ruins, but the most famous is:

Roy's, which opened in 1938 at the height of the "Mother Road"'s popularity, is in Amboy (founded 1838), which now bills itself as "the ghost town that ain't dead yet". After many years in decline, it is being restored for the nostalgia tourist trade, and a number of films have included scenes shot here. The cache outside the cafe was in a tucked away "Route Beer 66" bottle.

There were many other amazing sights along the "Main Street of America". It has become a tradition for people to use rocks to spell out names and messages along the embankments. Some are quite colourful:

...some are cryptic:

...and some are monumental (many of these rocks have "Ed and Karen" painted on, with different dates):

I stopped at Amboy Crater, an 80,000 year old extinct volcano.

Since I was on a push to get 200 caches that day, I didn't hike up and into the crater itself, as that was a 3 hour return trip. I did pick up the Earthcache in the parking area though.

There have been lots of other interesting things to see here, including Bullhead City, Oatman, Needles and Topock, but I'll save them for another post.