A little over a month ago Mrs. All Beef and I hosted the 2nd Annual Cedar Rapids CITO Extravaganza event near the roller dam. The Cedar Rapids Parks Department said a lot of people illegally dump trash and garbage here, due to it's remoteness, and we can definitely confirm that because their was so much trash it was unbelievable. This is a geocaching CITO (Cache In Trash Out) event and we had 46 people attend (plus one puppy) help pick up all the garbage. We picked up 70+ garbage bags of trash and many, MANY bulky items. You can seen the bags and the bulky items (a chevy tailgate, tires, concrete horse, bed spring, etc) in the photograph above. It was a fun time and we also hid a small geocache in the area to commemorate the event (as we did at last years event).

We also gave out prizes donated to us from Uncle Stan's Military Surplus (2 ammo cans and 3 decon containers) and from IowaAdmin (Groundspeak Trackable 2008 volunteer geocoin). We also gave out some unactivated travel bug dog tags and a couple unavtivated 2007 Iowa Geocoins.

The place was nice and clean after we finished and the Cedar Rapids Parks Department was very happy. :) We're looking forward to next years event!

--All Beef

MOGA 2008

My wife, our son, and I attended the geocaching Mega-Event (500+ geocachers in attendance) called MOGA (Midwest Open Geocaching Adventure) for the second straight year! It was awesome and we had a lot of fun and met up with friends we made last year JC_Geo (that's their geocaching name). Their were a lot of people from the Iowa Geocachers Organization (IGO) who made the trip to Perry, MO (Mark Twain Lake) which was good to see.

I competed in the one-person competition this year and came in 3rd place! So, you're looking at the midwest 3rd place geocaching champion! :) I found 23 of the 30 hidden geocaches in 3hours 10 minutes. Those 10 minutes put me past the 3 hor time-limit which meant I was penalized one cache for every 5 minutes. So my official score count was 21. I also had two geocaches I could not find...so over all I made it to 25 out of the 30 caches. :) The terrain is not for the faint of heart as I ran and hiked right around 9 miles consisting of steep hills, valley's, ravines, obstacles to watch out for (often covered by leaves and sticks), streams, coves, etc! A total blast.

We stayed in a cabin this year instead of camping. Our son is too young at this point to be camping in a tent (or so says my wife). :) It was still a lot of fun and the place we stayed at was great. Very nice.

The picture above is of the Mississippi river at an overlook in Hannibal, MO. We stopped here on the way to MOGA to take a short break and do a little caching. Hannibal is an awesome town and has many great geocaches to find. We always love stopping here.

--All Beef