It wasn’t easy sorting through the caches on Tony’s GPS. I couldn’t see the favorite points. I had to click through the list and find one that sounded interesting, check the difficulty and terrain, read the description and the logs to see if it was worth pursuing, then look at the map to see if it was a reasonable distance from our intended route.
“How’s it going?” he asked after a very quiet fifteen minutes of highway time had passed.
“Well, there are lots of caches along the road. I am having trouble finding one that interests us.”
“Well, just find one close to the road five miles or so away to give the GPS time to lock on and give us a map. Then we can look for a good one while we are stopped.”
“Okay.”
As it turns out “near the road” is a relative thing. On the little screen you lose some of the perspective so a cache that looks near the road is actually a mile off the road. I locked onto a cache with the very original title of Exit 138. However, the cache was only named after the exit we took to get to it. The cache itself was down a frontage road. We exited, turned down the frontage road and it followed the highway for a while and then diverged from it to go down a small canyon and the cache was half a mile from the highway, but over a mile down the frontage road. We didn’t mind because we were just looking for a cache, but it taught me a lesson in GPS usage.
The highway passed over the little canyon but the frontage road followed it, dipped down into it and climbed back up the other side. The cache was in the turn toward the bottom of the canyon. Tony stopped the van, we climbed down from it and got our bearings.
“Looks pretty straightforward to me,” Tony said. “This is more like typical geocaching.”
“I think it says to go this way.”
“How far is it?”
“Two hundred and thirty feet.”
“Okay, so we’re obviously looking at a rock or bush hide. All there is around here is rocks and bushes.”
I followed the direction the line pointed and I ended up on the side of the canyon in a nondescript section of land. There were no trees but plenty of rocky brushy hillside.
“Just find ground zero, then put the GPS down and use your geosenses. This is one of those where you get close and then a sharp eye will spot an irregularity in the landscape. You might have to be at just the right angle so if you think you looked in a spot look again from a different direction.”
I walked around, found ground zero and I was standing in a spot of bare dirt. I looked in the bushes near the spot. I flipped over a few rocks. I looked for piles of rocks or sticks. I walked away from ground zero and then tried to find it again. This time the GPS led me to a spot about ten feet away.
“It says I am zero feet from the cache,” I reported. “And it said that over there by that bush, too.”
“Put it away. Use your eyes. This is supposed to be an easy one and I don’t see how it can be difficult. There’s no real hiding place anywhere near here.”
“There sure are a lot of places that are zero feet from the cache,” I said. “They must be using bigger feet than I am used to. I always thought a foot was twelve inches.”
“Maybe metric would work better?” he said.
“Do the meters match real meters?”
“Just as much as the feet match real feet. Use your eyes and your hands.”
“Then you take the GPS,” I said. “So I’ll quit depending on it.”
It was his turn to follow the GPS to various spots and he came to the same conclusions I did. That ground zero moved about.
“I don’t get it. The sky is clear and blue. We should get a good signal…”
He put the GPS down and began searching. I think every bush got searched and every rock got unstacked or turned over on that hillside. Twiggy picked up the GPS again.
“Oh great! Now it says a hundred fifteen feet that way.”
“That’s the bottom of the canyon,” I said. “They wouldn’t put it where water would get it.”
The other side of the canyon was a rocky bluff. And when we got to the bottom of the canyon it still said the cache was twenty feet away. When we tried to walk twenty feet we hit the rock wall.
“It better not be up there,” I said.
“It could be accessible from the top,” he said. “It just seems strange for the GPS to lead us over there and then suddenly jump. It’s not unusual for it to jump twenty or thirty feet but this is a bit much.”
“It does look like there are better hiding spots up there, though.”
“If we have to get to it from the top then it would be better to go back to the van and drive around. The road would take us right over there and it’s nice, flat walking.”
That made sense so we went back to the van and drove to the other side of the canyon. The rockier side of the canyon was fun and the view down the canyon was spectacular. After a rain the bottom probably had a stream running through it and it would be even prettier.
“How far this time?” I asked.
“Three hundred thirty-six feet.”
This time we ended up walking along the top of the canyon until a trail led downward. I wasn’t sure it was a man made trail, but it was wide enough to walk on. I followed Tony down the trail noticing there were more tracks from hoofed animals than people. What kind of tracks were those? Cattle? Deer? Goats? I really hadn’t noticed tracks before so I could only guess. We reached a large, flat rock that hung over the canyon and this was where we reached ground zero. I stood on the rock and looked down at the spot we had been standing before.
“This is more like it,” Tony said. “Lots of hidey holes for caches here. These can be tricky and the right angle is more critical in places with lots of little shadowy places. It might be completely invisible from one angle and very obvious from another. And then there’s the ones that are just hard no matter how you look at it. Watch out for snakes. Sticks come in really handy in places like this. If you’re uncertain about sticking your hand in, poke around with a stick first. We don’t want unpleasant surprises.”
I found a stick first. If there was one thing I didn’t want it was unpleasant surprises, especially the slithery variety. Mice were bad enough. I definitely wanted to avoid snakes. I went from one dark, shadowy crevice to another poking the stick in and wiggling it around, then sticking my hand in to see if a container was inside. I must have looked in every hidey hole along the trail and then I heard a “found it!” from beside the flat rock.
“It was nice of them to provide a comfortable, scenic signing spot,” Tony said as he carried the cache to the top of the flat rock. We sat there above the canyon sorting swag and signing the log, a gentle breeze wafting by.
“This is a pretty spot in its own way,” I said.
“It sure is. That’s what I like about geocaching. If a geocacher likes a spot they want to share it with other people so they hide a cache there. It’s not true all the time. There are plenty of caches out there that are just there for the sake of a smiley, but I’ve found enough pleasant places to keep me searching for the next.”
This time I had lots of swag and I really liked sorting through the swag to make sure there was something for a girl, a boy and an adult geocacher, just in case a family was out geocaching together.
“Wow, you’re generous,” Tony said.
“Little girls need swag, too,” I said. “It might get discouraging for a kid to never find anything interesting. If you were five what would you like to see in a geocache?”
“Hot Wheels.”
“Really?”
“I had this huge track setup. We used to see which cars made it the furthest down the track. So… yeah, Hot Wheels. A boy can never have too many Hot Wheels.”
“I’ll have to find some next time we’re in a city.”
“It really matters to you to restock the caches?”
“Yeah! It’s like leaving a surprise present for some unknown person. It doesn’t matter if I never meet them. Just knowing there was something there for them to sort through and one thing they might want to keep makes me happy.”
He sat there for a minute. “That’s what makes the hobby fun. A giving heart.”
“If I had known where this cache was I’d have suggested a picnic on this rock.”
“That would be cool,” Tony admitted.
“So this is more what real geocaching is like?” I asked.
“Rural geocaching, yeah.”
“Cool!”
“It’s not always at an interesting spot or a view down a canyon, but you can choose to only find ones that might be at an interesting spot. There seems to be enough geocaches to keep most anybody occupied for a long, long time. One of these days I need to introduce you to geoart and power trails.”
“They have geocaching art?”
“Sort of, and not exactly. Remind me next time we have the geocaching map up. It’s easy enough to see what it is on the computer with the right zoom factor.”
“And what’s a power trail?”
“It’s a whole bunch of caches spaced close together so you can find a lot at one time. They are placed mostly for the numbers. The caches are close together so the hiding places might be minimal and since there are so many of them the containers have to be easily replaced. So you end up looking for a hundred plus pill bottles all in a row. I don’t like power caching. This right here, what we’re doing, finding caches in pleasant surroundings, feeling the breeze and the sun and getting out away from campus, this is my idea of geocaching.”
“Me, too. I think the rock dragon clan must live here. There’s lots of rocky caves for them to live in.”