Amboy Geocaching Adventure

 A year ago, I was looking around different places around the state where I could travel too and look for geocaches.  I had discovered that a geocache was hidden inside the Amboy Crater, a cinder cone volcano in the Mojave Desert, off of historical route 66 between Barstow and Needles.  I shared this with two of my best friends Scotty and Jane, and they got interested in joining me to find the cache.  As time moved on, I got busy, and when I had free time, it was too hot in the desert.  A year later, I re-mentioned it to Jane and Scotty and they again were interested.  I took a look again at geocaches hidden out there, and noticed two caches now were in the Amboy Crater, and tons of caches in the surrounding areas.  Last Thursday was the day we traveled out to the Amboy to have a geocaching adventure.  This would be the first major trip I have done with a purpose of only geocaching.
     
     I woke up at 6 in the morning by my phone alarm, but didn't get out of the warm bed until 6:45.  I took a shower, ate a bowl of cereal, and then went online to check facebook, twitter, e-mails, the weather reports, and to instant message people.  I felt good this morning, for the past 4 days I have been in bed sick with a nasty cold.  I was afraid I would have to cancel this trip, but this morning I only had a runny nose and congested ears, so i decided to hike anyway.  I lost track of time online, and before I knew it, my friend Jane had texted me that she was heading over to my house.  I rushed to get dressed, make a lunch, prepare an ice chest, and pack up my backpack for a full day of adventure.  I was still getting ready when Jane arrived.  I got all of our stuff packed in my car, then Jane and I headed down to pick up Scotty from his house.   After picking up Scotty, we made a stop at Stater Brothers to pick up some water, then headed to Subway so Scotty and Jane can get a lunch for themselves.  After Subway, we drove up to the Highland Chevron so I can fill up with gas.   We then headed on the 137 mile trip out into the middle of nowhere.


     The drive out to Amboy didn't feel as long as I thought it would be, but that could be because I was driving.  I had planned to find two geocaches on the route out there.  The first geocache was hidden at the rest stop off the I-10 freeway just passed Yucaipa.  Sadly, the rest stop was closed, so we were unable to grab the cache.  We drove towards Palm Springs, and headed north on the 62, up to Twenty Nine Palms.  Twenty Nine Palms would be the last big of civilization we would see on the drive.  From Twenty Nine Palms, we drove 50 miles north right into Amboy.  As we got close, I spotted the cinder cone volcano that we will be hiking in.  Before we hit the National Trails Hwy, or historic route 66, we stopped in the middle of a salt flat/lake bed to find a geocache at an entrance of a salt mine.  As we got out of the car, we noticed it was really windy, and made it cold outside.  Right away I started to think that it would be this way on the hike into the Amboy Crater, and it would make the trip less enjoyable.  The cache was in plane sight, and we logged it and got right back into the car.  We continued our drive to the Amboy Crater parking lot.

     When we got there, we got everything together, went to the rest rooms, signed the visitor's book, then headed on our hike out to the volcano.   We were very happy that there was no wind at the parking lot, compared to down in the salt flats south of the Amboy Crater. It was unclear where the trail began, for there were no signs, so we walked over to the look out to the volcano and began walking into the lava fields.  The first geocache was the Amboy Earthcache.  This isn't a container, but we had to look for geologic features of the area, take a photo of it, and submit it to the owner of the geocache explaining why we thought it was that geologic feature.  Right as we started our hike into the lava fields, I noticed a good amount of Pahoehoe lava flow, which you can tell from the smooth and glossy texture of the large file of rock.  I took a photo of it and will use it for the logging of the cache.  As we where hiking through the lava fields, we started to realize the hiking trail was to the west of where we were walking.  We started to get tired of walking over all the Scoria lava rocks, which were making our feet begin to hurt, so we found an unofficial trail and we used it the rest of the way.  Walking on the sand felt a lot better.  While walking through the lava fields we spotted a cool black insect that had a black large abdomen and a small body and head.  Never seen them before in the desert.  Doing some research at home, it is possible that this insect is a desert spider beetle, but im unsure.  As we got close to the volcano, it was amazing how big it looked up close compared to from the parking lot.  We finally got on the main hiking trail, and hiked to the west side of the volcano, where we would start climbing up the mouth of the volcano.

As we began climbing into the mouth of the crater, Scotty took the lead, then Jane, and I hiked behind Jane in case she needed help getting up to the top.  I let Scotty take the GPS unit, because all the time when geocaching I have the unit, so this time I decided to let someone else have it for a chance.  Scotty rushed up to the top of the mouth of the crater, and found the cache, located south of the trail, when Jane and I were about half way up the trail.  We got to the top of the mouth, and walked over to Scotty who was looking through the large ammo can geocache.  I dropped off a travel bug that I picked up from a cache off Highway 1 near San Simeon back in November.  I logged Scotty's and mine usernames in the log book, and then wrote Jane's name, since she doesn't have a geocaching account.  We then took a group photo, using one of the Scoria rocks near by as a tripod.  We stopped for a few moments, looked out from the cliff of the mouth of the volcano, and saw the lava fields that rest to the west of the cinder cone.  At this point, we had hiked 1.2 miles from the car.  

     After a few moments, we started going for the other geocache hidden on the volcano.  We walked into the bottom of the crater, and noticed water at the bottom.  It was cool to see the sun just reflecting off the crystal clear water.  We realized that the second geocache must have been hidden on the rim of the volcano, so we started hiking up a steep path out of the crater and to the top, on the rim.  Scotty rushed up to the top, but I stopped every once in awhile to make sure Jane was alright getting to the top of the volcano.    Jane is scared of heights, so she sat down while Scotty and I walked on top of the rim to find the geocache hidden there.  Scotty found it, and we looked inside, and logged it.  While logging, noticed the geocache was hidden by boy scouts in Redlands, which was kinda cool to know.  We placed it back, and started walking east on the rim.  The rim was a good width in the beginning, enough to fit two people in width, but it narrowed as we walked further down the rim, to were we had to walk single file.  At that point, all it took was a slip, and we could have fallen all the way down the face of the volcano to the lava flow below.  After awhile, we stopped, for it go to narrow to walk on, and turned around and headed back to Jane.  It was windy at the top of the crater, but had a great view.   When we got to the top, you can see nothing but lava fields and deserts surrounding us.  To the northeast you can see the few buildings in the mostly abandoned community of Amboy.  We could hear and see several trains going through Amboy, some heading to Barstow in the west, and others were heading east from Barstow.  

 After taking some photos and enjoying the view we got sick of the wind, so we walked on the rim of the crater to the west till the mouth of the crater, and walked on down from the volcano.  This time, we took the official trail, which we spotted from the crater rim.   It seemed to take longer to hike back to the car via the official trail, for the trail had to maneuver us through large deposits of Pahoehoe lava flow.  We made it back to the car.  In totally, we hiked just about 3 miles to and from the Amboy Crater.  We got in the car, and drove over to the main sign where we took another group photo, using my car as a tripod.  Our next mission on the trip was to find 11 geocaches hidden right off route 66, within the 2.4 mile distance from the crater to Amboy.  The first few caches, we would drive as close as possible, then Scotty and I would get out to look for it, log it, then get back in the car.  For one cache, while I was logging, Scotty ran back to my car, got in the driver seat, so I had to sit in the passenger seat.  Then Scotty had an idea.  Since each cache was only .1 miles apart from each other, it would be more easy if he just walked to each one.  He started walking and I headed back to the car.  Jane decided to steal the driver seat.  So Scotty would walk to each cache, find it, point it out to me.  Jane would stop the car, I would get out to the cache, log it, then re-hide it, and get back to the car to drive up to where Scotty found the next cache.  This system worked really well, and probably saved us a good amount of time.  After finding the caches along side the highway, we got back into our normal places in the car, and headed to the next cache in the Amboy community.  

     This cache took us to an old cemetery on a dirt road near the old church in the area.  We found it, then looked at the cemetery and took photographs.  Afterwards, we stopped at the historic Roy's Motel & Cafe sign.  We walked around, and took photos of the buildings, mostly abandoned and frozen in time.  The post office and the gas station seemed to be the only thing still in use today.  At this time, the sun began to go down, so we headed east on route 66 to find a few more caches along the way.  We also stopped at a fallen down tree which was covered in shoes.  I had never seen so many shoes like this before just dumped there.  It was cool to see.  After finding a few more caches, we headed north on Kelbaker road, so we can get on the I-40 and take that to Barstow.  We found two more caches on Kelbaker road.  The first one was hidden at an entrance of some kind of mine, right behind some very large and beautiful quartz rocks that has some crystals on them.  The second cache was further off the road, west on a dirt road a few miles south of the 40.  It took awhile to find this geocache.  We looked all over at different bushes and didn't see anything.  We stopped because we noticed the clouds were in beautiful colors from the sunset so we just had to take some photos.  Then we went back to it.  I saw an old rusty spring at one of the bushes.  I decided to pick it up, and noticed something inside.  The spring was the cache.  It was real creative.  We logged it, and headed back on the road, for it was getting dark fast.  We were done finding caches for the day, and we had found 24 geocaches all together that day in the Amboy Desert area.  


     We took a longer route home, drove the I-40 to Barstow and took the I-15 down through Cajon Pass back into the Inland Empire.  It was about 170 mile drive.  We stopped off at Jane's dad's house in Adelanto to visit and have lunch.  We got there around 7:00 and chilled there till 9:30.  We got back to my house around 11.  We chilled in my car for about an hour before we called it a night and everyone headed home.  This was our first major trip we did just for geocaching, and I know there will be more in the future.  For more photos, check out my facebook page.