Thursday, April 17, 2008

Cache your way to fun at the family reunion

Something fun to do at the family reunion. This must be a hunt family tradition, go where the fires are burning. Just kidding, the last time they came to Idaho Yellowstone was burning down and then they want to see the remains of Vallecito, go figure. Anyway, on to the caching:

This is first in series of four caches that will take you to all 15 of these great carving. The first 7 are visited in this section, which can be completed in less than an hour.

The Tour of Carvings Project is a comeback story of the Missionary Ridge Fire of 2002 near Durango in SW Colorado. Between June 9th and July 28th, over 70,000 acres were burned costing $40.8 million and using 4000+ fire related personnel from all over the country. Vallecito Lake is home to thousands of Ponderosa Pine trees with many over 200 years old and standing up to 175 feet tall. A former resident Paul McGinnis called his parents during the evacuation asking what was to become of the damaged trees. When told they could probably be milled into lumber, he suggested carving them into firefighters and animals impacted by the fire. This would pay tribute to all concerned. After a winter of carving by local artist Chad Haspels, the tour of carvings is on display.

Most of the carvings are mounted on concrete piers and can be found all over the lake area. Each one stands 18 feet tall and weighs around 3000 - 4000 pounds.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

So is this like geocaching?

BellyBoatBum said...

Yes. The carvings are monuments to the firefighters that died there a couple of years ago. And someone has hid geocaches near them as sort of a memorial. You get two with one stone. And Cache must seemed a better headline then Geocache. But how did you like the pun with hunt. The Hunt's like fires and you hunt for cache. I guess it just proves the point about people who laugh at there own jokes.

Unknown said...

I was just reading about geocache in the boy scout magazine i really think kids would love that its like a real life treasure hunt. looking for treasure is really up Toby's ally he digs in our backyard sure he will find dinosuar bones hasn't found any yet in three different houses.