Geocaching champions and a fire...all within hours!

Just got back from the 2nd day of our small towns annual "Frontier Days." We watched the parade, walked through the car show and then Will entered the first local GPS Geocaching event. Dad and I helped him with the clue deciphering while he entered the coordinates on his GPS and then we were off! The coordinates were handed to the teams right at one and we had until three to find as many as possible of 14 clues. I had sense enough to make Will wear tennie runners but not enough sense to wear mine. Flip flop's aren't conductive to happy Geocaching, even if it's in town and within a 2 mile area. Will didn't enter in his coordinates in order so we did a whole lot of backtracking and recovering ground at a feverish pace. It was so much fun though and Dad and I had fun trying to figure out where the next cache would be just by the deciphered clue. Will did a great job and after racing back with three minutes to spare and one cache short he won the event! Then to top it off, I had bought 6 tickets for $5 for the fund raiser for the event and the prize was a MT state Geocaching coin of which they only minted 1000. I put Will's name down on all 6 and .....it was drawn so now he has $25 for winning and a really coooooool coin! Dad and I got to get some exercise and have some family time with our son doing something that he really enjoys. It was a win win situation. We figured we walked about 3.5-4 miles today, so not bad for a fun morning! In the morning and during the local parade about 2 hours before Will's geocaching event, all of the emergency vehicles, which just so happened to be IN the parade, turned on their sirens and flipped around and sped out of town. Apparently, there is a fire that broke out not very far from our little ranch. It's across from us on a peak called Toll mountain. It's at about 60 acres right now and they are fueling up the helicopters right across from us as we speak. So far I've seen one tanker plane and 2 copters with dump buckets but I'm sure there's more tanker planes coming from the other side. I'm going to post some pics of TEAM DUECK geocaching and then some fire pictures. I have some great parade pics but I'll have to post them later. Lets all hope the wind stays northward and doesn't change and blow southeast at all for our sake. Have a great day! Just took a five minute blogging break to look outside and Steve just spotted a new fire breaking out about 10 miles away from the first one, there's a spotter plane circling it, so at least the Forest service knows about it too. I can tell right now that were in for a long night.
the organizer hands Will his packet of coordinatesand the race is on!

Dad did the deciphering of the cluesI just handed him the coordinates and he loaded them
He's letting his GPS calibrate the coordinates...or something like that
we had a hard time keeping up with the boy!
Dad and Will on the movemom had to find this one in front of the local IGA, Will's way off!
We made a great team!
looking out from our garden area




this is the county road shop across from us

and then there was another...