I decided to try a real life thread. This one will be based on my recent introduction to Geocaching.
First, a little background. I heard about geocaching a couple months ago from a couple poker buddies. My initial reaction was to laugh at the idea of getting coordinated from a web site and usnig a GPS to find a box with small trinkets, just to sign a log and exchange trinkets (or just sign the log).
The next month, my curiosity began to peak a little as I was regailed with afew of their adventures in geocaching. Everyting from being kicked out of a park after dark by police to being waste deep in a swamp. My curiosity had begun to get the best of me. I had begaun to think a little more about the hobby and looked it up on the internet to see just how large of a community there is.
The community is international and there are caches all over the world. It was an amazing thing to see.
At the last poker night, a coulpe weeks ago, another one of my friends mentioned that they had just purchased a GPS and had begun geocaching. I head how much his family loved it and how much excercize the walking was giving them (something that I could definitely use).
I finally gave in and decided to give it a try. Like always, I went head first into it and picked up a GPS. My reasoning was that it is something that can also be used for gettig directions when driving somewhere.
My GPS arrived a coulpe days ago and I ended up setting aside Saturday afternoon to go out with one of my poker buddies who had been doing this for the past month. He usually goes with his wife and daughters but it would just be the two of us for this adventure.
He printed out three locations at a state park near where we grew up for us to try for my first time out. We would often take his old Subaru out and explore the back woods areas or hike to find different objects of local legends so hiking through the woods would be nothing new to us, just somehting that we haven't done in quite some time.
After first parknig at a location about amile away from the closest point, we began our trek only to find that we put ourselves on the opposite side of the lake from the points. We decided that trekking back to the car and driving to a parking area on the other side would be our best option so we went back and drove to an area that was about a half mile from the closest cache.
Our clues for that cache was that it would be near a metal spike, you 'could' boat to the area and 'I love George'. We found a wooden foot bridge at a few feet from the coordinates that we entered into the GPS. That bridge had the words 'I love George' etched into one railing and a metal spike was just below that.
We began to search from there for quite some time and came up empty. We found nothing within about a 30 foot radius of that spike. There was twine on the spoke that looked like it had been cut. We believe this could have been where a cache was dangling and maybe lost.
At that point we gave up and headed to the next location. Our clue here was two bridges and a metal pipe. We came upon a slightly less traveled trail that led us across 2 wooded 'bridges' (if you want to call a couple feet across a runoff area a bridge).
Past that point, we came across a metal drainage pipe. That put us within about 25 feet of the corrdinate (with about a 27 foot margin of error at that point). We fanned out off the path at that point into an area that was not that thick. Within about 5 minutes we spotted a plastic container that was camoflaged with tape. This was the cache. There were small trinkets inside but we merely signed the log as we brought nothing to exchange (usually the exchanging it more for the kids when they are along, though I have been told of a local one that has CD's that are exchanged inside). We did leave what is called a CITO (cache in trash out) which is a container with a garbage bag that fututre cachers can use to remove any trash from the area on their way out.
On to the biggest adventure of the day. We headed towards one with only one clue, about 150 feet of bush-whacking. The cache was a 2.5 on a scale of 5 in difficulty based on location, which meant I should expect something a little more difficult to reach.
We reached an intersection in the path that we were on that led eitehr right or left. The GPS said the cache was striaght ahead about a quarter of a mile. After looking a little in each direction for a path, we decided that this must be the bush-whacking that was mentioned (though a quarter mile is wuite a bit mroe than 150 feet (next time IO do the navigation
).
The area that we entered weas rather gwon up and it kept getting worse. At one point we were balancing on fallen logs with thorny branches in our face and about 6 inches of muddy swamp below. The growth was extremely thick for most of our travels and we kept having to go parrallel with our destination as there was not possible way that we could have gone forward without having any better equipment.
At one point, my fruiend stepped on a log and I saw a tail of a snake quickly slither under the log. After pausing to size up the suituation, we felt it best to head in a different direction than where the snake went (which was right where we had to balance past). That snake was probablhyk more scared of us than we were of him, though I wouldn't bet the over-under on that one.
Finally, we pushed through a thick area only to find a path a few feet away. We travelled on that path and it took us to a point about 100 feet from our destination. The 'bush-whacking' involved to get to that opint was minor at best, compared to what we just went through. We found the cache and it had been lefft slightly open so the contents were soggy. We signed the log and headed back down the path.
As we got to the end of that path, we found that the path came out near where we started our cross-county trek. In fact, if we had just checked about another 100 feet in that direction we would have seen the path. It looks like we had just turned a 2.5 into a 5. At least it gives us a good story about our geocaching treks. Stories like that make life fun.
On the way back, we had to pass the area where we searched for the first cache. He had received a call from his wife, who was in the area with the kids and she said that she would meet us where we parked and help us look for the cache.
Unfortunately after quite a lot of searching we came up empty. All we had to show for it was my friend's half soaked pant leg as he was venturing too close to the edge of the bank to see if anything was under the bridge and the amount of recent rain made that part very unstable.
My first ever day of geocaching was over. We had logged 2 of 3 caches that we set out for and had several good stories to tell. The only remnants of the trip was finding either a deer tic, or baby tic, on my leg later. Hopefully it was just a baby. All in all, the DEET did it's job keeping the tics off us (when compared to a past adventure several years ago where 5 of us ended up having a good couple dozen tics on each of us by the end of the day as they were dropping out of the trees and everything that day).