862. Creede, Mineral County (CO48)

Unlike my confusion upon approaching the courthouse in Pagosa Springs, I know what the problem with this courthouse is.  It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just not good.  It’s basically a barndominium or like a prefab church or something.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, Creede is a small town so it’s not like they need some vast behemoth of a courthouse to project authority over the surrounding area (how could they overcome the majesty of the mountains anyway?) but I feel they could have done better than this.  I assume this is replacing an older courthouse, possibly from the mining days.  Maybe those would have been more interesting?  This modernity just didn’t cut it for me.

I’m sure that everyone knows someone who is a total grognard when it comes to caching, that guy who says that park and grabs and micros in trees and, honestly, anything requiring less than a half-mile hike isn’t really caching.  Well, Mineral County is the place for them.  Every cache in the county is either up a mountain or in a remote location.  I thought I might go for the closest one to town, considering that it was a 2/2.  The description didn’t mention that you either need to hike a quarter mile toward a mine entrance (which I didn’t have time for) or use an ATV to get to it (I left my ATV back home in my other pants).  The only Virtual in the county I unknowingly passed on the way here from Pagosa Springs but involved a hike out to a waterfall anyway (which, again, I didn’t have time for).  I managed to find one on the map just outside of town that looked promising.  As it began to rain, I parked by a bridge over an early tributary of the Rio Grande and climbed up into the rocks and trees at the foothills of a mountain.  After a search, I found an ammo car, nestled down in a crack that I couldn’t quite reach.  For a moment, I wondered what I was going to do: it felt a little too difficult for the journey I was on.  I didn’t come all the way out there for this.  And then I snapped out of it.  I am an effete, cardigan wearing, Latin spouting snob.  But that is by choice and sometimes I forget that.  I’ve rolled around in the dirt and had to get physical with the environment (and, on a few occasions, people) before.  So I pulled off the cardigan and got down in the boulders.  It was wet and grimy and I was worried I might slip and hurt myself in the rain, but inveni, inscripsi, reposui, people.  And with that, I was ready to get the heck out of the county.  I’d leave the other caches to the grognards for their edification and continue on to…