347. Aztec, San Juan County (NM31)

This is not a courthouse, but rather the County Administration Building. As mentioned previously, the administrative center of the county is my primary goal and this is the only serious contender for what it could be. Not only does the central building have a certain county courthouse panache to it…

…it has the war memorials. I never really considered those as a metric, but if the county is going to honor people, it only makes sense that it would be at the center of governmental power. It turns out, with later research that I was right about this place, but honestly, if it turned out that I was wrong, I don’t think I would have come out here again to fix the mistake. This is a bit off the beaten path for my liking. As a further sidenote, I had no earthly idea so many Code Talkers were from here. I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me since I knew a lot of the county was part of the Navajo Nation.

The county turned out to be surprisingly cache rich, but there weren’t a lot of good candidates near the courthouse area. I ended up driving down to nearby Farmington, since I was going to have to pass through there anyway. I decided on an interesting looking trackable hotel and, once I got there cracked open the lock. I’m usually a little leery about front yard caches like this, but it was prominent enough that it didn’t look as if I was trying something too suspicious. Unfortunately, there were no trackables contained therein (there haven’t tended to many floating around these days. Maybe some past cachers should release all those trackables they have sitting in their closets), so I dropped off a little buddy in the hopes that it would go have other adventures with other people. My work here done, I got to driving again. Daylight is a commodity, folks. It was time to get to the place I ended up discarding on the first trip. But this time I would be coming at it from the desert side, not the mountain side. I crossed through the sands until I hit a few foothills that touched on some mountains and came to a stop in…