Mondo's Colorado 64 Challenge

10/22/2018 By kenyansherpa
Today was the culmination of a quest over a decade old. Thanks to mondou2 for creating the excellent challenge and maintaining the cache over all these years! It has been very enjoyable to work my way through the counties, the memories of those trips have been wonderful. The icing on the cake is that logging this cache completes another long term challenge that I have been chasing for a decade as well. The placed date and D/T rating on this one fills in the final slot for the original fizzy challenge cache - Well Rounded Cacher(The Fizzy Challenge)GC11E8N. And the timing is impeccable, as I have a trip to San Francisco in 10 days, so will be able to find and claim that too. So thanks again mondou2, I wish I could award double favorite points! All is well with the container and it's contents. I took the travel bug to get it on it's way again and left a Team USA Olympic pin TFTH!!!

08/17/2018 By nerak2001
Completed the challenge and received the final coords a while ago. Made the hike up there today in the cooler weather. The cache is in good shape. Thanks for the challenge!

12/13/2017 By jasperdakota
Caching in the area today. Still working on this challenge. Hope to log as found someday.

10/07/2017 By team w-bar-v
We have worked on this Challenge for 10 years. Thought we had all the counties 2 years ago but then informed we were missing Mineral County, don't know why we had not gotten that as we were in the area at least twice. Lucky we had an RV trip planned with our camping group to Creede, CO. We picked up three caches over that weekend. Wasn't long before we got the final coords. Since we had two reasons to come up to Golden and Boulder for the weekend, it turned out to be a very good time to go for a hike to make this Challenge complete.
A special thanks to our oldest son halfamind & better half, they came to help us and support us when we needed it to get this hike completed and the cache was found, logged and traded out a few items. Left a Travel Bug.
Much to our surprise even Dad made it almost the whole way. Dad & I with the dog walked down the trial while halfamind & better half went on up the trail for a couple more caches.
Thank You Mondo for the Challenge. We have enjoyed our travels all over Colorado.
You are receiving a Favorite for this Cache.
Happy Trails Hope to you you someday at one of the Events. Smile Smile
Halfamind & Better Half with Charlie

Found the Cache

Dad made it most of the way

Team w-bar-v with Charlie the dog

Beautiful day for a hike and caching

08/14/2017 By allenmabry
1:32 PM Finder #39, I believe. This find was about 10 years in the making. I had no concern about any of my finds being too early to count, because this cache published the year before I began geocaching. My first FTF was in Colorado (GCYY3R, Frying Pan, Lake county). Naturally, my wife made the spot on that one. She has been with me for every county find in Colorado. That is not true for Texas, Oklahoma or New Mexico. Only Colorado.

We live in Texas and our caching here has been during one or two week stays over the years. I made a concentrated effort to work on the Colorado counties beginning in the Fall of 2013. We would take different routes to and from Colorado Springs area for a couple of years and we even spent time in a couple of different parts of the state to "light them up." We finished this year with a big swing west from Ft. Collins through Steamboat Springs, up to the CO-WY-UT NW corner of the state, down to Grand Junction and over to Basalt to complete the last 9 county requirements. We made extra stops for the DeLorme pages and a big trip to the Tri-State corner. (We got away with only a slow leak in one tire.) I stopped counting how many logs I signed below EstesLynne and BugRanger.

Geocaching has led us to some great hikes in Colorado, especially in the early days. I never searched for hikes, I just read the geocache descriptions. We started with Grouse Lake and Grouse Mountain, Beaver Creek overlook and the like. Soon I was trying to find pre-April 2008 caches for the Texas version of the Fizzy Challenge and many of the higher D/T ratings were most readily available here in Colorado. That is how I discovered (GCK71T) "Dos Lagos," one of my favorite places of all time.

Another memorable cache was "Cataract Ranch." I noticed it when we were at Copper Mountain in 2007. It took me a couple of years to manage get around to it. The hike was a 2300 ft elevation differential from trailhead to cache (not counting up and down), 11.5 miles round trip in 8 hours (with an extended stop at the upper lake). I was second to find four years later. (https://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LUID=c5f3b68b-e63d-458b-b88f-185caa2991fc) It was rated a 3/3. Only in Colorado.

But I digress... I know that project-gc has validated my qualifications, but I had started a bookmark years earlier and I like being able to choose the cache that I would like to use to represent each county. My bookmark list is public and is now complete.

We completed the requirements on August 4, with "Riverside" (GC6D6Q9) in Pitkin county - the last of the 9 counties on our seven day swing through the NW corner (with a day off in Steamboat Springs).

We are staying in Divide for a couple of weeks, as is our custom. Today we drove up to find the challenge cache and sign the log. Even after a couple of weeks of acclimation, we still huffed and puffed going up the hill. When I opened the cache to sign the log, I had to chuckle to see that I was signing the log below @Team Chili Fries who used to live in Denton, TX and now lives in Colorado. (I think I finished "I've Been Everywhere (In Texas)" just after they did. It is a small world, indeed.

Thanks for the encouragement to visit the whole state. I still have about 5 DeLorme pages and the southwest corner of the "Big Box" to complete and then I think I can say that I've been everywhere in Colorado - unless someone writes a song...

I am giving this one a favorite point and dipping my "U.R.A. Nut" travel bug here. Thanks for the great memories.

Photo

08/13/2017 By Team Chili Fries
We headed out today specifically for this cache. We completed challenge (our 6th state) last month and got the final coords and finally figured out early morning was best time to find parking had a great time hiking out here today and Kathy did the last couple hundred feet because Michele is recovering from a broken wrist and didn't want to reinjure it. Dropped a bug to move along and hiked our way back to the car. Thanks for an awesome challenge.

07/22/2017 By elrep
Wow, we live in a beautiful state! And we've had so much fun exploring it from edge to edge and corner to corner as we worked to complete the counties and DeLorme challenges. We found and signed both final caches today.

We started caching after getting our first GPS for Christmas 2008. I don't recall when we learned about the challenges but I don't think we decided to seriously work on them until sometime in early 2011. Since then we've made 13 trips to different parts of the state, some just for caching and some caching on our way to other states. We finished our last counties and pages in early July with a trip to the southern part of the state that included a relaxing visit to the Pagosa Hot Springs and a spectacular day riding the Durango-Silverton Railroad.

Thank you to everyone who placed the caches we found (and the ones we didn't find) on our journey. And a special thank you to Mondo for maintaining this challenge. We've added favorite points to many of the caches we've found along the way and are adding one for this cache as well.

06/08/2017 By Edwards654
Yay! Hooray! Did it. Over Memorial weekend we went and got the final two counties down in Ouray and Lake City. Finally able to get the coordinates and make the Trek to this one. Thank you Mondo for a great Challenge and a great hide.

11/04/2016 By BugRanger
I've been working on this challenge, plus the Colorado DeLorme Challenge & Great Square of Colorado, for about four years now. I had most of the western counties & many in the central part of the state already done. When EstesLynne wanted to team up for some road trips, off we went to get her more DeLorme pages, and some stray pages & counties for me, while also getting GC19. Then we did a mega geo-road trip to the east for more counties & DeLormes, and the SE corner for both of us, also getting Arikaree, Mt Sunflower - plus OK & TX while we were there. Ooops- missed Elbert County. Rats!
Next mega-roadtrip is out to western Colorado, to get more counties for EstesLynne (I only needed Ouray & San Juan), plus the rest of our DeLorme pages, and a memorable drive out to the NW corner. All done but one? Nope - I'd gotten a virtual in Teller county, which won't count. Rats! Still have two counties left...
One more road-trip, for the last 2 oldest caches in Colorado: Paul Barclay Stash & Four Paws, with side-trips to Elbert & Teller Counties. Just as we finished getting Paul Barclay, I get the text from Mondou - I'm done & cleared to get the final for this challenge! We got the final on the return to Estes Park, making the find just as the sun went down behind the hills. What an adventure - and we're done!
All the fall colors trips, the spring sandhill crane trips, side-trips while skiing, & mega-caching trips; and LPCs & CSQ caches, the mountains vistas & the windmills on the plains - made for an incredible 4 years of caching! Thanks for the Challenge!

11/04/2016 By EstesLynne
And...thus concludes an epic summer of journeys around Colorado, mostly with Bug Ranger. In addition to this challenge, we finished the Colorado De Lorme challenge, the four corners of the state challenge, and the Escoffier (ten oldest caches in Colorado) challenge, so we have been EVERYWHERE. In fact, Bug Ranger found that she had actually missed having traditionals in two counties she thought she had, so we went to some of those everywhere-places twice. We're just glad her missing counties were Elbert and Teller, and not Baca and Moffat.

As of yesterday, though, Bug Ranger was up to snuff and approved, so on our way back to Estes Park from a road trip to the Springs we came by here to get the final. It was a bit longer of a walk than expected and it was getting late, but we got to the container just as the sun popped behind the mountain. We made it back to the car without artificial lights, even though it's November, so all was good.

Thanks for the challenge and a long summer of blue highways. Loved every mile of it. Now I feel like a real Coloradan; I can smile and nod knowingly when someone mentions obscure towns. Better yet, now I want to go back to some of those places, and I'm sure I will drag my non-caching husband along too. I'm done...but no, never really done. Onward!

10/17/2016 By EstesLynne
Here are my qualifiers--just in case EarthCaches don't count, I have other caches in those two counties, too. Anyway, here are screen shots of my project-gc output. Waiting for the final coordinates now!
CO counties 1

CO counties 2

CO counties 3