Geocaching success!

We set off for Ciscero Peak to try our hand at locating our first geocache. We got to the top of Ciscero Peak and set off. After about 10 minutes we knew we were in the right area from the readings from the gps and the help of the decrypted hint. Soon, John called out "I found it!" Sure enough, here is what the find looked like:

Uncovered, you can see the geocache box.
Inside the geocache box, there were little trinkets and a log book. You are encouraged to take something and leave something as well as sign the log book. As this was our first find, we decided to take nothing, leave nothing, and sign the log book as you can see I am doing below:
That was fun! We got to take a drive up a beautiful mountain, smell the wonderful pine smell, and take a short hike in the mountains. This is a view from the top of Ciscero Peak:
We sure enjoyed ourselves and were very happy that our first geocaching attempt was a success.
When we returned to our campground, we headed off to find the cache that Geri, our campground host, had hidden on National Forest land. We were off and after a short while we located the most likely location of the cache but our gps compass said we off the mark. Soon we were headed down the hillside which didn't make sense because Geri had said it was located up on the hill. We ignored the compass and paid attention to the map and distance coordinates instead. Soon we were headed back in the right direction. John went around the front of the rock formation and I went around the back. Soon, I was the one yelling, "I found it!". What a sense of accomplishment. With these two experiences under our belts, we think we have found something that could combine fun outside activities with a sense of purpose.

We did learn something from our experience looking for Geri's cache: always bring water, wear a hat, bring a rain poncho because it might rain on you (it did), get a good compass, bring the hiking sticks, and carrying all the above in a backpack. We shared our experiences with Geri upon our return to the campground. Everyone got a good laugh out of the fact that we were a little wet upon our return. It was beautiful when we left but we forgot it was South Dakota and that weather changes quickly!

What a fun day.