I've only had one encounter with geocachers.
I was over near the ballpark in Durham last summer when I found a bunch
of people obviously looking for ?something? ... Being the helpful soul
that I am, I asked 'em WTF they were doing?
They explained all about geocaching and told me there was a cache
somewhere in the vicinity, but that they were unable to locate it.
I asked if it might be the old film canister I could see stuck into a
gap in the ball park's brick wall.
They didn't seem too appreciative.
From: Doug Brewer
Scott Loveless wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 6:16 PM, Mark Roberts <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>Here you go:
>>http://www.robertstech.com/blog/?p=58
>
>
> What's up with the geocaching?
>
This is the write-up I did in the geocaching.com forum:
"So my friend Nicoman and I are relativley new to caching. This will
become evident. We were both in the area of Mossy Rock (GC4431) for an
event at Grandfather Mountain. I had done a quick search for travel
bugs, since tomorrow I'm off to Colorado and I thought it would be cool
to take some along. Not much time for prep work, so I just grabbed the
coords and glanced at the online maps...
Friday afternoon I took off down the hill and turned on the eTrex. I
followed the arrow until I came to the "Member's Only" Golf Course.
Several trips around the neighborhood surroundings had me wondering why
the cache would be on the golf course, so I decided to turn up a
different road, and I came on a trail head at a turnoff. The GPSr
indicated the cache was .54 mile away and I put on my boots for a nice
nature walk. A couple tenths into it I glanced at my watch, which told
me I didn't have anough time left to hike in, look for the cache, hike
out, and still make it to where I needed to be at 3pm. I turned around
and went back to the car.
Saturday morning I was talking to Nicoman and I said he had not had good
luck finding any caches, so I suggested we go find this one. After
wrestling with his GPSr for thirty minuted ar so, trying to figure out
how to enter coords manually, we got it pointed toward the cache and
drove to the trailhead.
Now, some people would have been put off by the cable strung across the
beginning of the trail, blocking the way. But we're not "some people,"
we're GeoCachers! Some people would have been put off by the sign with
the name of the trail on it, broken off and lying on the ground and no
longer reliably indicating the proper direction of the trail, but we're
not "some people," are we? NO! We're GeoCachers!
And some people, when faced with an arrow on both units that said the
cache was a half a mile that way, through what could very well be the
thickest stand of wet rhododendrons in the known universe, with no
discernible trail, would have rethought the whole thing. but we're not
"some people," are we? No!
We're morons.
With no hesitation, with no timidity, with no working gray matter, we
jumped in and fought our way through. Through bushes. Up steep grades.
Over rotten logs. Past slugs the size of small snakes. Over rocks. Mossy
rocks, no less.
I can't count the number of times we stood somewhere in those woods,
noting that there was no possible way to get any farther, then finding a
way. We kept losing the sat signals and had to bull through to an
"opening," and try again. The tree cover and rolling clouds kept us
guessing. I stepped onto a slippery log and ended up gashing my shin
with a sharp rock. Several times, when gravity and a committed angle
conspired to keep me from remaining upright, I reached for support, only
to have it crumble as I crashed through and landed on whatever was below.
And yet, though the cursing and crashing and tumbling and certainty that
we would not fid the cache, we kept laughing. We were on an adventure,
to be sure, and we were having a grand time.
So, three hours later, scratched up, covered in mud and bugs and sweat,
huffing and puffing and looking for all the world like Andy DuFresne
when he crawled out of Shawshank, we emerged onto the marked trail and
the top of the mountain to marvel at the view.
A quick converation with a tripod-toting photographer we came upon
confirmed our suspicions: that there was a paved parking lot about a
tenth of a mile away, right off the Blue Ridge Parkway, and that if we
had driven another ways up the mountain, we could have just rambled in
and been on our way.
So did we find the cache? Yep. After a few moments rest, we took some
readings and walked right to it. I was a little crestfallen to find that
the original had been swiped, so there was no travel bug to tote to
Colorado, but I was thrilled that LittleJohn had put in a replacment
logbook and some tags so we would have something to find.
Both of us signed the log, and I left a carabiner keychain. We rehid the
bag and walked the couple miles back to the car for the drive back to
GFM, laughing the whole way."
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