Empirita Ranch

On Monday, KennyV, 3:10 to Yuma and myself went geocaching in the Empirita Ranch area. Empirita means "little empire" which make sense because Empirita Ranch broke off from the larger Empire ranch back in 1941. In the 1990's and more in 2001, Pima County bought the land to preserve the historic buildings and ranch lands (oh yeah, the ground water played and important part too). The public, through permit can use the access road into the ranch, and the adjacent State Trust Lands... and that is exactly what we did. Helllllo Geocaches!

We met up around 9:30am for our adventure...

Making it to our first cache on the ranch took a while, but the roads were relatively nice for dirt roads.

 

There was a little debating on which way to go for out next cache. You see, roads out in the middle of nowhere are not really "roads" and just because they were roads last month, doesn't mean they are this month. Rain can do a lot out here.

So... we opted for the shortest route distance wise. I'm sure it took us longer time wise though.

For example, the photo below. I know it doesn't look like much. But it was a big ol' ditch. We had to fill it some of it by hand with some big rocks... and we still barely made it. There was a lot of soft/loose dirt on this one. We also had TWO vehicles that had to make it through. eek!

After traversing the "short cut" we had decided to take we got back on more established roads. We got within .2mi of the next cache before we had to get out to walk the washed out road. There was a surprise though.... a WATERFALL! You don't run across many here in AZ, especially when it isn't Monsoon season.

I know it doesn't look like much.... but the water at the bottom looked about 4 ft deep and the waterfall was about 10 ft high. Here, have a listen:

 

We headed to a  couple more caches and struggled to find out way out of the area on some not-so-great roads. We knew there was NO way we were going back the way we came!! I was a little worried we'd be driving around the area at night, but we happened to get on the road out just as the last bit of daylight disappeared! 

 

Shakiest video ever, I just wanted to see if I could give someone a headache, or maybe even make someone throw up.