Saturday, February 4, 2012

The town too tough to die

     Tombstone Arizona motto is "The town too tough to die".  From what I can see it could also be called the "The town full of great caches".

     One of my early cache trips with SchnauzerQueen was to Tombstone in search of one cache in particular,  El Diablo's Treasure.  SchnauzerQueen has caching friends that live in the area.  One of whom is Sanruft, the man who got this whole thing started for her and then me.  Much thanks to Sanruft for getting us off our butts and out there caching.  

    Here is the scoop about El Diablo's Treasure:
It is located just west of the town of Tombstone in a beautiful desert area.  It is listed as a difficulty of 1 1/2 and the terrain 1 1/2 also.  I found it to be a nice little hike and was glad that I forfeited the usual flip flops for tennies.  It's a large cache and the owner has lived up to the reputation of the town old west where gunfighter ran crazy and the ghost still remain.  So beware if you are weak at heart.  From where we parked we had an easy little hike thru desert bushes and some really neat wash areas.  I especially like the washes since you can find all kinds of signs of the wild life.



     When this cache was originally placed there were a few people that thought this cache was symbolic of something evil.  And ya know it only take a few to make something out of nothing. The cache was nick named The Happy Halloween Cache to pacify those few. Originally hidden in October of 2004 makes the nick name a good one.  
     
     There have been 348 logged visits in the past 7 years and the post from the finders are great.  Here are a couple of them -
Found it Found it
01/03/2012
By far our favorite in the Tombstone area.Thanks for the extra effort on this one.
Found it Found it
10/12/2011
One of the best ones yet, w/ serial70. Very interesting at night
Found it Found it
01/29/2012
#617 Noon: The sun was directly overhead when we parked the covered wagon & journeyed on foot the last few yards to the site. Buzzards circled in the distance hoping for one or two more souls to become victims to El Diablo's curse. As we opened the cache, a slight breeze blew across our faces! El Diablo's odor flared our nostrils and wrinkled our faces in agonizing grimaces! We signed the log & left a kaleidoscope, taking Hoher Stiefel boot TB. Suddenly, the odor vanished & the buzzards soared away into the distance. We walked back to the wagon and after giving our horses a sugar cube, we made our way toward the next cache.

As you can see, people just love this cache.  And oh that SchnauzerQueen - she falls for the most interesting guys!

     I contacted the owner of El Diablo's Treasure and asked him how he came up with this idea.  This is how he responded -

Actually, we teamed up with friends of ours that live there in Tombstone. We were sitting around having a few cocktails one evening about doing unusual Caches, and we all giggled about doing some really elaborate Caches that would be strange and unusual in the desert. We were fairly close to Halloween, so we thought it would be awesome to do a theme that resembles Halloween. We were honestly going to remove it after Halloween, but it became so popular, we decided to leave it where it lies today. There has been a newspaper article written about it in one of the Tombstone papers, due to someone hiking one day and thought it was a Satanic Ritual of some sort. The Sheriff Department and all kinds of folks went to see it and discovered it to be what we know and love as a Geo Cache. . . . 
 
      Well - this is my favorite cache to date.  There are more in the area that I will post about over the next couple of weeks.  Like I said - Tombstone is a great place to eat, drink, sight see and cache.  And just out of town to the east there is another great find, if you like oddities.  Check it out.

      Just to let you know -  Tombstone Boothill Graveyard does not support Geocaching at this time.  There are no caches hidden there and the manager does say that if he hears or finds a cache there, it will be tossed out.  Too bad since it would be such a great place to play.

3 comments:

  1. My mom and her hubby did that cache and told me it is good, and now that I've read more about it here, I really want to try it!

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  2. Oh, and I thought boothill had a mystery cache or something. I think I remember going there for information on one before?

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  3. Hey Erika - the map shows a mystery cache but there is no actual piece to find. i don't know why but the manager of the place really dislikes caching. or maybe just in graveyards. i have done a couple that were on fences of graveyards but never in one. after seeing you piece from Florence, i am going to hit that one soon.

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