Rich Elmore and I spent a couple hours in the Olmstead area looking for some new geocaches.  Although we started off on "the loop" the quest quickly took us off on trails that I had never ridden before.
  We had four caches in mind for the day.  The first was a brand new cache, just placed by someone on Nov 2.  In the geocaching community being the FTF (first to find) is always a goal, but we struck out.  The second cache took us to an old homestead and an easy find.  Then it got tough.  The next cache was somewhere beside a large pond but we were again skunked except for a "surprise" that I stumbled upon.  Leaving here, we had to pass through several deep puddles due to the recent rain before rejoining the classic loop and descending to Salt Creek.  By the time we made it to the fourth cache I was out of time and a quick search wasn't enough to yield a find.
  All in all it was fine day to ride, explore some areas I had never seen, and get a good workout climbing up out of Salt Creek.  Man, that stretch just seems to get longer and longer every time I ride it.