Geo Art

Geo art is when geocaches form a shape to make a picture. They're more common in the lower 48, but have recently started making an appearance in the rugged landscape here in south central Alaska as well.

Recently, a local cacher known as li1gray, put out a piece of geo art in honor of the Iditarod. His artwork, when looked at on one's GPS is in the shape of a dog sled. It's also a ? cache, so when the puzzles are all completed, turns into a 40 cache power trail.

Until today, I had never done a power trail or a piece of geo art, so myself and two friends, Cally & Ray, set off down the highway to complete the finds after solving the puzzles earlier this week.

Cally made her 100th find while out on the trail!

At the end of the trail, we attempted to take a group photo of us jumping in the air to rejoice the end of the trial, but it turned out to be a series of bloopers, including this one, where Bosco decided to take out my feet mid air.

Having completed the power trail much quicker than anticipated, we set our sights on finding 50 caches each before the end of the day. Normally, this wouldn't be much of an issue, but when the sun is only out for about 5 hours each day right now, we knew our time was quickly -and quite literally-fading.

So we drove down the highway in hopes of finding a few more winter friendly caches, but the further north we drove, the deeper the snow. None of us seemed to mind tho, as we had the Talkeetna Brewery in our sights, which also meant pulling out the JetBoil to heat up some homemade tomato basil soup I'd made just that morning.

After we'd had our fill of warm soup and cold beer, we were back in the car (don't worry mom, everyone was sober). Daylight was completely gone at this point, but it didn't matter anyways. The sky was clear and the stars were out in full force to light our paths.

We had just parked the Subaru in front of the ITC headquarters in Wasilla, when I looked up and saw the northern lights were just starting to flicker above us. We moved to a more suitable spot to view the show, and I witnessed one of the better aurora shows I've seen to date.

When we'd had our fill... actually, it was more like when the numbness became to great in our limbs, we got back in the car and headed to a nearby neighborhood that was decked out in Christmas lights and in sync to a short wave radio. There's something magical and truly un-describable about driving through a neighborhood, listening to your favorite Christmas carols and watching the lights flicker in sync while the northern lights dance across the sky above you.