COLORADO CACHING - PART 3

This day was predicted to be nice and it was.  I had a short but scenic and twisty ride planned but I wasn’t sure about the route because much of the road looked pretty obscure, like maybe it wasn’t even paved.  However, Yancey Google mapped it and what you could see through the trees looked fine.

It was Sunday morning and the traffic was light.  The first part of our journey was urban in Adams and Broomfield Counties.  Although the weather and motorcycling was perfect, the Geocaching wasn’t.  Yancey was leading and navigating with his phone.  I believe he was having a problem seeing the map because of the sun position and went past the first cache in Adams County and then we couldn’t find the second one.  Fortunately this is a county I had done on a previous visit so we proceeded on to Broomfield County where we soon found one.

Broomfield County is very small consisting mainly of the community of Broomfield so we were very soon in Boulder County.  Our first stop was along side the highway where the cache was hidden near a sign.  Just as we were about to leave a police car pulled in behind us on the road shoulder.  I thought, “Uh oh, what now?”  It turned out that he was just checking to see what we were doing.  When we told him, he was very friendly and even went to the trouble to make a phone call to check on the highway we were concerned about.  He assured us it was paved and in good shape and wished us luck.

Heading up the road for lunch

Yance bags one along Hwy 103

We soon entered Boulder Canyon on Hwy 119 which was a beautiful ride – a twisty road along side a stream with steep canyon walls on each side.  The traffic was heavy in this area, however.  When we got to Nederland which is a small resort community next to Barber Meadow Reservoir we stopped at a café for a break.  We continued on this beautiful ride down to I-70 where we took a short jaunt west to Idaho Springs.  I believe we stopped there for gas.

Lunch at cemetery

Beautiful marker for 4 yr old child

Now we exited to the south on Hwy 103 which was the one I had been concerned about earlier.  Just out of Idaho Springs we stopped for another Colorado Spirit Quest cache at a beautiful cemetery.  The cemetery was on a mountain side with graves extending for a long ways up the mountain side.  It was such a beautiful spot that we had our lunch there.

The Gunslinger Cache

After lunch we proceeded down Hwy 103.  I don’t believe I have ever ridden a more enjoyable motorcycle route.  There were many 15 mph curves, perfectly smooth pavement with no potholes, just a moderate amount of traffic and beautiful Colorado mountain scenery.  We stopped for a half dozen or so caches along this route with only one DNF.  And we met the world’s oldest skateboarder.  I regret that I didn’t get a picture.  He was a really nice guy and told us a funny story about his confronting punks who were stealing a Geocache.  He may have been younger than he looked but I would judge his age to be well up in his 50’s.  He had long scraggly hair and wrinkled skin like one who was born with a cigarette in his mouth.

We arrived back at Yancey’s mid afternoon having covered just 153 miles getting Gilpin, Clear Creek and Jefferson Counties.  However, it was a fantastic day of motocaching. [To be continued] M/W