I just got back from Ajo visiting Kelly this weekend. I drove down Friday afternoon. It's actually quite a nice drive. The mountain ranges are really beautiful. We stayed in a little cabin at the motel. On Saturday, Kelly had to work, so I drove 30 miles south to Organ Pipe Cactus NM. That place is really cool. The Ajo mountains there are tilted fault blocks of a rhyolite and tuff sequence, kind of like the hills along the Vulture Mine Road west of Wickenburg (for those of you who were in Steve Reynold's Advanced Field Geology class). I hiked up the Bull Pasture/Estes Wash loop, and I swear when I reached the Bull Pasture, I just wanted to take off into the mountains. They're really cool. I wish I didn't forget my camera, but I'm sure I'll be back. There were a lot of wildflowers in bloom because of all the rain we had this winter. There were other plants that were just getting ready to bloom, so April will be a beautiful month. I even saw a stubby little cactus with a huge purple flower on top!

I also found the mystery letterbox. Letterboxing and Geocaching are two nationwide treasure-hunting games that are slowely gaining popularity. Geocaching is the more popular of the two, probably due to it's use of GPS to locate the cache. A geocache is simply a (hopefully) airtight plastic or metal canister filled with a logbook and a few trinkets. The GPS coordinates of the location of the cache are then posted to the website. People use their GPS to find the hidden cache, take one of the trinkets, and leave one of their own. It's kind of a fun group activity, and it gives people a reason to go out and appreciate the outdoors. Letterboxing is a more British approach to treasure-hunting. A letterbox contains a logbook and a rubber stamp, sometimes hand carved from an eraser. The finder of the letterbox has their own stamp to put into the logbook, and usually records the letterbox stamp in their own notebook. The main difference between letterboxing and geocaching is that only clues are given to the location of the letterbox, not GPS coordinates. This adds a bit of sleuthing to the fun, and it's a good feeling when you confirm that you've figured out the puzzle. The letterbox in Organ Pipe is a mystery letterbox in the sense that the nearest city is not given, but I guess that secret's out in the open now. Not that it was really hard to figure that part out anyway. It was still fun poring over the park map trying to figure out where it was. I'm not interesting in the stamping part of the hobby. I just liked figuring out the clues. Kelly thinks both letterboxing and geocaching are totally gay, but I can't help it when there's a fun puzzle to solve.