Moments in Dirt and Ink

Lake Mead National Recreation Area (map link) The folks at Geocaching.com like to have "challenges" from time to time. Usually, they just assign points to types of caches and if you get enough points, you get a souvenir. (There's a place on your profile to find these. It's not something meaningful.) Sometimes they get a little more intricate, like the one they had running when covid hit, Wonders of the World . In this one, they assigned "wonders" to geocaches randomly. There were two levels. You needed to find one each of the "modern wonders" to get the first souvenir. Then it was on to the "ancient wonders". When covid hit, the deadline became indefinite and then two more levels were added: "natural wonders" and "solar system wonders". I got through the first three levels by ignoring it until I found I had one to find, then making an effort to find that one. It took over a year to get through the third level si...

Lake Mead National Recreation Area (map link) Even with a hike in, a well known hot spring is likely to have too many people around. Still, it looked like a good hike and I decided to go for it. There's more than just the hot spring. There's the arch, the view points, the adventure on the not-quite-trail parts, the petroglyphs, and the rest of the hike. Access is mostly easy on a piece of the old highway, but it is a left turn across the interstate when going south. There are no bathrooms (and no timed entry or fees) at the trailhead. There is also a "scenic bridge" that looks like typical depression era highway bridge work to me. I've been over many of them and stopped at a few. I even hiked miles to one of them . I was probably over this one once, shortly after going over the Hoover Dam. The trail starts at the edge of the wash the old US-93 bridge spanned. The trail drops down into the wash and under the modern I-11 bridge, which has some picturesqu...