Ryan the Rock Climber

Our grandkids always visit us looking for adventure. Ryan was almost 9 the last time they came, and he loves to go geocaching. If you're not familiar with the sport, it's where people hide treasure boxes all over the world and post the coordinates on the internet at www.geocaching.com. Anyone who wants to play can get a listing of caches hidden in their area, then fire up their GPS to go find them. Protocol allow the finder to take a "treasure" from the box and replace it with something of equivalent value. Ryan call it Treasure Hunting, and that boy knows how to handle a GPS. We went after one that was hidden in the desert near the Las Vegas Wash. Our path to the objective couldn't be a straight line because there was a huge water filled sink hole that we had to climb up and skirt around. But nothing can deter us desert rats; we claimed the prize.

The next adventure on our agenda was a rock climbing expedition to Redstone along the Northshore road in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. The petrified sand dunes that are exposed here are bright orange and pocketed with holes like swiss cheese. The rough sandstone gripped the soles of our shoes and allowed us to walk the rock ledges like a fly (or a gecko). Ryan's mom would have had heart failure watching him scamper along the near vertical walls from one "hideout" hole to another. Sometimes these hideout holes were better suited to grandson than to grandpa! Other time the opposite was true. Nonetheless, we made it onto every hole that we could find.

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