Mike is a native Southern Utahn, since he was born and raised in Hurricane. He got to enjoyed the strong sense of family growing up in the Hurricane Valley. He was very lucky to have both Grandparents living close by and being able to see them every day right up to the time they passed away. They both lived one block away from him, one on the NW corner, one on the NE corner. Mike was the first grandson and was born on his Granpa Stratton's birthday.
While Dendra's family moved around a lot as she grew up, in fact, she lived in five states and nine city before she was 11 years old. Then her folks relocated once again, moving to the Hurricane Valley to build chapels for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, at that time Dendra was in the sixth grade. That is when Mike and Dendra met and grew up together as childhood friends and soon after high school they were married in 1973.

This cachin' couple lives in Toquerville and has hidden some fun caches around that area. They've been geocaching since April 16, 2004 and love the thrill of the find. They especially enjoy virtuals with historical value of the culture and the people who made this area great.
We would like to thank Mike and Dendra for taking the time to share there life and cachin' stories with us.

ST: How were you introduced to geocaching?
MD: Our High Tech Kids, Colt told us about the game, Saddie bought us our first GPSr, A Gecko 101, Travis has kept us going, updating, teaching us new ways to explore this GREAT hobby.

ST: Very cool, so Mike when and how did you get into the tractor hobby?
MD: Mainly the interest began at a tender age 'cause these Cub tractors were what I learned to drive on. My Dad had one, but so did my Grandad and several uncles around the Hurricane Valley. I got a lot of chances to drive them usually while picking peaches and other chores around the farm and at home. I enjoy working on them because they are a very simple design with a flathead 4 cylinder engine that develops a WHOPPING 9 horsepower!!!! Plus the sound and the feel seem to relax me and bring back pleasant childhood memories.
ST: I checked out the web site you recommended and I noticed the symbol on the tractor. My grandfather owned one that looks close to a cub cadet, but orange. When I would mow his lawn I used it the pull the old lawn rotating clipping blades behind it. Very fun.

ST: What is the best treasure you have taken from a cache?
MD: Not sure really, but it sure is fun to see what people come up with to put out for trade.

ST: In your opinion, what makes a good cache?
MD: Taking us to a good place, something I would normally miss. There are soooo many neat places I have lived next to all these years and am just now finding them through Geocaching and the great folks who put out caches to invite us along on the adventure. Also having to think and search a little to find the PRIZE!

ST: I'm not familar with Chevum-like caches, yet. Tell me more about them?
MD: Chevums has unusual caches that require a certain amount of "thinking outside of the box". So several of the more popular caches around Southern Utah are copies of his caches. I have even seen some labeled as "Southern Utah Classics" by those who have used his ideas. My son Travis has several in Henderson using his idea's. Needless to say they never fail to entertain and are very popular.

ST: You've hidden several caches, which one is your favorite and why?
MD: Eavesdropping on the CCC Camp. We love History related caches and this one has a little Chevum to it as well.

Read about a biography of Lyall Wilson who volunteed into the CCC Camp program

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Using HTML on your cache page, part 2.
I'm going to show you how to do some fun things when creating or revising your cache page. You can also use what you learn here and use it on your profile page. In part one, we went through some simple terminology and a few easy codes for you to play with the month. If you want you can even cut and paste from the page to help in your learning process.

As before, when writing HTML code the code is placed in what they call a tag, which is also called angle brackets <>. Code writing within these brackets and are properly tagged will not be seen on the web page. The cool thing is, is that what you put in the brackets tells your browser how you want the font to look like, where you want to link to, what picture you want to show and so on. To me all of this is very cool. Before any of this will happen geocaching.com needs to know you are going to write in code, make sure you place a check mark where it asks are you writing in HTML.

Let's move onto changing the face of the font and the color. Ok, there are a few fonts that are browser ready/safe for almost all browsers. These font faces are called TrueType Core Fonts for the web.
A list of those fonts are:
Arial
Comic Sans MS
Courier
Georgia
Times New Roman
Verdana
Sans-Serif
Helvetica
Geneva

Each of these different fonts are defined as the face of the font. When we tell the browser that we want to change the face of a font we are going to write it in the code as such. Inside the brackets we wil type <font face="Courier"> Here is what the code is saying: the font face we want is equal to whatever we put in quotations, in this case courier. At the end of the word, sentence, paragraph, etc. you will need to have a closing tag which is </font>

Here's an example of how you would write it on the edit page (make sure you check the HTML box):
<font face="courier"> Park in parking lot. You will need a pen and tweezers</font>

Here's an example of how it would look on the cache page:
Park in parking lot. You will need a pen and tweezers

The same basic principal applies when changing the font color <font color="red"> Here is what the code is saying: the font color we want is equal to whatever we put in quotations, in this case red. At the end of the word, sentence, paragraph, etc. you will need to have a closing tag which is </font>

You can type in the basic colors by name "red, blue, yellow, etc. but if you want more diverity and a larger range of colors you'll need to use what's called the hex code, which is something that the browser will be able to understand. Go to the following link to choose a hex code color. Easy to use just change the color name to a hex code and make sure you place the pound sign before the hex code as well.

Here's an example of how you would write it on the edit page using either color name or hex code. (make sure you check the HTML box):
<font color="red">Park in parking lot</font>
<font color="#FF0000">You will need a pen and tweezers</font>

Here's an example of how it would look on the cache page:
Park in parking lot

You will need a pen and tweezers

You can play with different combinations. From what you learned from this and last issue to create some fun cache pages.

There should be enough here to get a hang of it, if you have any questions on anything that we have covered here just email me and I'll walk you through it.

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