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12 September, 2009

Clint's birthday present

Marty and I were at Paws Up, a resort in Western Montana last weekend with Ruth and Lowell Quenemoen. We had a great time but also had an unexpected highlight on our trip. Clint had noticed that Paws Up promoted something called "geocashing". It had something to do with using a GPS and finding things.

One afternoon, Clint took his birthday present, a Garmin, turned it on and realized that one of the "caches" was very close to Camp Fortunate, the home where they were staying. The cache was no more than 100 yards from the back door when he located it with his Garmin. From then on, as we drove around the Paws Up ranch, the Garmin was turned on, looking for coordinates and comparing them to locations of other caches (Clint was trying to avoid hiking long distances) that were near the roads. Eventually, 4 different caches had been located when they realized that the prize cache was called the "mother lode".

Clint drove until he thought they were near, then parked the car. After close to an hour they found the cache, only to learn the "mother lode" was in 4 sites, not 1. Off they went to the second site, found it, the third site, they found it, but by then they had been climbing hills and trails for 2 hours and were exhausted. They realized they were close to the house, so they arrived tired and without the "mother lode"

Early the next morning they drove to within what they thought was a mile from the 4th and final cache of the "mother lode". You can see from the pictures that it was not an easy hike, you would have expected smile, but Clint was tired.

The reward was a lot of exercise, the tokens that were retrived from the cache boxes were traded for a T-shirt and Clint is hooked on "geocaching".He claims he is the oldest geocacher to find the "mother lode" at Paws Up. He has now signed onto an internet web site and has discovered numerous caches near our home in Stillwater County.
You knew you had found the cache when you saw the box, the trails were well marked and at times you had to look hard to find the caches.

The views from the areas where the caches were found were spectacular.
but the climb, the rocks, and the terrain for the "mother lode" was tiring, look at Clint & Marty