March 24-25, 2008
The airline that I work for in Helena required that I go to Salt Lake City for flight operations training, and since I was staying in a hotel downtown, and because I didn't have a rental car, I figured it would be a great opportunity to do some geocaching in a town (and different state) I had never geocached in before.
Salt Lake City city-scape
The first day that I arrived in town, I arrived mid-morning and had the rest of the day to spend on my own, so I went down to the hotel's lobby computer, did a quick search on geocaching.com, and printed off some of the cache pages for nearby, interesting geocaches.
I made my way down towards Temple Square, one of the biggest tourist attractions in the city. Being Monday morning, however, the number of tourists were at a minimum and I found that throughout the day I would have many of these locations more or less to myself.
At Brigham Young Historic Park Pond, a cute little park with a pond and some other water features, I found the traditional geocache, GC1AAAT Stone Stage. A short walk later, and closer to Temple Square, I found another traditional geocache, GC18RW0 Downtown/Main Street USA: Salt Lake City, UT. I had seen similar geocaches of this series pop-up recently back in Helena, so it was fun to find this one 653km away from my home coordinates. While I was in the area, I toured around Temple Square and took a look for and found another traditional geocache, GC18TJQ Temple Square. The buildings here were stunning, and I spent some time just admiring all the work that had gone into constructing them.
Heading in a general direction back towards my hotel, I continued to play the part of a tourist and see many of the cool things Salt Lake City has to offer, while all the while geocaching. I found GC12V6H Stair-ing At It, GCQQX0 200 S & West Temple Block, GCM6GK James (cache) Penney, GCH53 Downtown Bondo Capital, and GCYA51 Launchpoint, all traditional geocaches, along with one Multi-Cache, GC112XP The Gallivan Center, which provided a fun way to explore the unique downtown center. The last geocache of the day that I found was a large traditional geocache, GCR206 Tour of Duty. It was a bit surprising to be able to find a large geocache near downtown SLC, but the theme of this one, a tribute and "thank you" to military troops, made me really want to find it.
Temple Square
The next day, after completing the airline training, I was in Salt Lake City for, I made my way back downtown to find and visit several Virtual geocaches. The first of these was GCD2BE Remembering the Volunteers, a tribute to the volunteers of the 2002 Winter Olympic Winter Games. Next was, GCHZ8T Brigham Young Historic Park, and GCHZZ1 Temple Square Virtual Cache Tour, followed by GCHZ82 The Conference Center. The last geocache I found while in Salt Lake City was a traditional geocache, GCQF8F Salt Lake City Travel Bug Hotel, another large size geocache container found in a downtown city (at the visitor center). I didn't have any Travel Bugs to move, but it was fun to see those that had been placed and were awaiting to be Discovered and Retrieved.
City Creek Center
In total, by the time I boarded my flight back home, I had found and logged 15 new geocaches and my first state outside of Montana to my geocaching map.