While we had a comfortable rock and a nice view we sorted through the caches on the GPS to find another one. It was very awkward trying to find an interesting cache between where we were and the lake. When we zoomed out enough to see our route we lost roads and landmarks. When we zoomed in we got more specific information, but usually not enough to base a decision on. The process was simple on a computer. We really needed that device that would make the laptop into a wifi hot spot anywhere we happened to be.
“Watch where I put it back,” Tony said. “So you can see where it came from. Every hide you see in person teaches you a new way to look for the next one.”
He put it back and I hopped down beside the rock to see how it was hidden. It had been hidden between two rocks in the shadows and then more rocks had been placed around it to catch the eye and distract from the container. If I hadn’t been looking for a geocache I never would have spotted the hiding place, much less bothered to unstack a bunch of rocks. It amazed me how I used to just walk right past geocaches without even thinking about them being there. How many people had stood on this rock to view the canyon never knowing two feet below them and a little to the side was a box waiting to be found.
“Okay,” Tony said. “I’m locking onto a cache ten miles up the road. It will at least get us closer to Belle Fourche.”
“What made you pick it?”
“People write good logs for it. People don’t write about caches they don’t like. There must be something there to spark their creative endeavors. Let’s go see what it is.”
“Okay.”
There was no use using up the batteries until we were five miles down the highway so I just rode along until my curiosity got the better of me and I touched a button to wake the device back up. We followed the frontage road back and got on the freeway again which put us 11 miles from the cache. When I brought the map up again we were still eight miles from the cache. I knew to just wait, and I knew seeing the map every mile was not necessary, but my curiosity would begin to grate on me and it was so easy to just touch a button and get an update.
“Eight miles,” I reported needlessly.
Two miles later I was pushing the button again. I thought I better buy Tony a pack of batteries since I was the one constantly waking the GPS up. Each time I expected to get more information on the screen but it just showed the little triangle that was us on a long orange line that was the highway.
“Are you doing okay?” Tony asked.
“Yeah! Did you know watching the GPS makes miles stretch?”
He laughed, “Yeah. How far away is the cache?”
“Three point seven miles.”
“How far off the road do you think it is?” He asked.
“A couple of miles.”
“Good!”
“Why?”
“You’re thinking.”
“I thought I went on this adventure to avoid thinking.”
“Sorry, kiddo, you’re doing more thinking now than in class. Maybe your brain is finding the way it likes to work out here. Maybe being cooped up in a class room isn’t your thing.”
“I need to figure out how to make it my thing. My parents expect me to get some kind of degree and pretty soon I’m going to run out of majors and money.”
“It’s a little hard to get a degree when you never settle on a major.”
“I know. Why don’t they have a degree in studentology? I could just be a professional student.”
“There are those. But I don’t think you want to spend the rest of your life at the university.”
“That’s true. Student life might be okay for getting out from under my parent’s roof, but it is not a long term solution. Oh! We need to watch for an exit, and when we find one, we need to go north. Don’t you think looking for a cache called Ill Tidings is ill advised?”
“Everybody seems to like it.”
“They liked Insane Asylum and The Pink Panther cache, too.”
“And you did, too.”
“After we survived them,” I added.
“You liked them at the time, too, aside from the unexpected…”
“Turn right and then right again.”
“Muggle bears and insane people,” he continued.
“If we find a bear in a cache I’m going to use it for a hitchhiker and turn it into a Travel Bug named Muggle Bear.”
“You’re talking like you’ve been doing this for years.”
“You’re just contagious. You know how accents are contagious? I pick up a wicked Texas accent if I am around Texans. Well, I guess the same thing happens with vocabulary. What do y’all think about that?”
“I’m y’all?”
“Well, if you were in a group you would be.”
“I thought that was all y’all.”
“Could be. Foreign languages are so confusing.”
“Since when is Texas a foreign country?”
“It’s not. It just feels like it way up here in the north. Have you ever been there?”
“To Texas? No.”
“We should go there someday.”
“We should?”
“We… um… hm. I don’t know. I’d like seeing Texas with you. They geocache there, too, right?”
“They geocache everywhere these days.”
“Oh. I think we better pay attention to the GPS.” I watched the little icons on the map for a minute then said, “Hmm, this road isn’t matching the road to the cache. Did we miss a turn?”
“I didn’t see one. Does the GPS show one?”
“Yeah, turn around and go back a little. I’ll tell you when you get to it.”
“Okay.”
He turned around but in the spot where I thought the turn off would be there was only a wash.
“Maybe it was a road at some point in time, but it isn’t anymore.”
“So now what do we do?”
“How far is the cache?”
“It’s still nearly a mile.”
“Do you want to try hiking there?”
“I don’t know. I think we should see how much water we have first. And dinner. What about dinner?”
“If we can hike two miles an hour we should be able to find the cache in a little over an hour,” he pointed out.
“And we’ll only be how many feet from the van?”
“We better take water, at least.”
We found three bottles of water and the cheesy party mix in the back of the van.
“We’ll go straight to town when we finish here. It’ll be dinner time by then,” Tony said.
We stuck the snack mix, the water and a couple of packages of swag into the day pack, locked up the van and off we went.
“How often is this cache found if it’s a mile of cross country hiking to get to it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I read the logs but I didn’t notice the dates. I guess I could do that.”
We hiked as he found the logs and I wondered at the way the land had changed over the eons. The timber line was low. Trees only grew on one side of the hills. I wondered what weather came out of the other side that made life difficult for trees. I was debating if the trees grew on the south side or the north side of the hills when Tony said, “Hmm, maybe we should turn back. These logs are two years old.”
“Aww, the poor cache. It’s been sitting out there for two years without a single visit?”
“Yeah.”
“Then we should find it. Maybe if people see it is still active they will try to find it, too.”
“There might be a very good reason it hasn’t been found. It might not even be there after two years.”
“What could happen to it a mile from a road? Nobody’s going to randomly run across that one spot in all this open land. It’s lonely out there. It needs a visitor.”
“Well, don’t sacrifice your precious swag on a cache that might never be found again. Did you know that a cache like this really is called a Lonely Cache?”
“Aw, that’s sad.”
“There is a group of people who go look for the Lonely Caches. They like the challenge of finding something that’s been basically out of the loop for years. If they find it they like to post about it and get it back on the radar screens of other geocachers. And if it is really gone they will see about archiving it so other people don’t risk a lengthy hike for no reason at all.”
“Let’s go find it. Maybe we can prove it is worth the hike.”
“Or maybe the title is a warning.”
“Maybe a pirate hid it,” I said appealing to Tony’s pirate side. “And they are warning other pirates.”
“Arg, then we go matey. Treasure seeking on the grand prairie. X marks the spot.”
“Yeah, right. Have you ever found a geocache at an X?”
“Yes. Actually it isn’t unusual for a geocacher to hide a cache at any X they find out of the way where it won’t get muggled.”
“Why do the trees only grow on one side of the hill?”
“They face the sun,” he said.
“Oh.”
“And the north side is colder. The snow melts slower. It’s more hostile on the north side.”
“I guess that makes sense. So the trees grow on the south side.”
“Right.”
“And if one grows on the north side it’s a brave and hearty tree.”
“That doesn’t mind having frozen roots most of the winter,” he added.
“It’s hard to believe there is that much difference between the north side and the south side. I can just imagine the mama trees telling the pinecones, ‘now don’t fall on the north side of the hill or you’ll grow up short and stunted.’ Then if one did she’d warn it to watch out for deep snow and freezing wind and the poor pinecone would… pine away.”
“Do you say things like that on purpose?” he asked.
“No, I just read my little speech balloon too late to avoid it.”
We had a lot of uphill hiking to do and my legs got very tired of the climb. I kept telling myself that it would be downhill most of the way back.
“Do you do much hiking?” Tony asked when he saw I was tiring.
“No. Oh, I do walk places, especially during school. I don’t mind walking to the mall back home, then walk the whole mall, too. So I do walk. It’s just the hill that bothers me.”
“We don’t have to walk straight there. If it helps, follow the side of the hill and correct your path when it’s convenient. The GPS will keep us on track.”
“Do you want to lead?” I asked.
“I like to keep you in front. I know I walk too fast for you sometimes.”
“It’s okay. You’re used to this cross country geocaching stuff. I’ll yell if you’re going too fast.”
“If we just turn a little bit to the left we can follow the side of the hill until we get to that little cut over there. Then it’ll be a short scramble to get up on top. It looks easier than what we are trying to do now.”
How many hills can you possibly fit into a one mile hike, I thought as we topped hill after hill. Tony had the right idea walking the side of the hill. We climbed slowly that way, though we had to adjust our route when we were drawn away from the cache.
“I think,” Tony said. “That there used to be a road here.”
“Why?” I asked as I came up beside him and looked over the top. “Oh. How did it get all the way out here?”
“There must have been a road here at some point and this car brought Ill Tidings to its owner in a most inopportune place.”
“I guess so.”
“The cache is thirty-nine feet away which puts it in the vicinity of that car.”
“This cache might be tougher than the fire engine one,” I said. “How big is it?”
“A small.”
“How’d it get upside down?”
“No telling. We don’t know where the road was when it rolled.”
“The car isn’t that old,” I said. “I remember these cars. How long does it take for a road to vanish?”
“Maybe the car was trying to fly and found out it wasn’t cut out to be an airplane.”
“It’s a mile from the closest pavement!”
“Yeah, well, sometimes the things we discover in geocaching seem totally random.”
We slid down to the car and began a quick inspection to figure out the best way to attempt to find a small container on an overturned car.
“What’s the rating on this one?”
“A five/five. It looked like a pretty easy five/five so I thought it was worth the hike. Some people go their whole life without finding a five/five.”
“So it’s not going to be obvious.”
“No.”
“What does the hint say?”
“Hint after DNF only.”
“Rats! We’re not going to be here again so there’s no point asking.”
“Not necessarily. If you had a cache that hadn’t been found in two years you might be a little more lenient about hints just to get it back on the found list.”
“How are you going to contact them way out here?”
“Hmm, good point. That little hot spot device is looking handier all the time.”
“So… no hints. I suppose they have to keep it difficult if it’s a five/five. Can I read the logs?”
“Sure, I thought you would do it on the way.”
“I was too focused on the map.”
Since we knew where ground zero was Tony began walking around the car poking his hands into all the crevices that can open up on an overturned car that had been sitting in one place for years. The body was rusty and the car had many bullet holes through it. The tires were missing. I walked around taking occasional glances at the car as I read. The logs were lengthy compared to most cache logs I had read. All except for the last one.
“I looked for over an hour and then I realized it was staring me right in the eye,” was what the log said.
“Oh!! Did you read the last one?”
“No, I just read enough to convince me it might be a fun one. Why?”
“Oh… nothing!” I said as I moved to the front of the car. It was a little difficult to get a good view of the front end because the car was upside down and crosswise in between two hillsides. I couldn’t get a good look from above and when I slid down to the bottom I couldn’t get the right angle to see what I thought was the hiding place.
“Grrr,” I grumbled to myself.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’ll figure it out.”
“Figure what out?”
“How to look where I think the cache is.”
“Where do you think it is?”
“In the headlight.”
“It can’t be.”
“Okay. Then you keep looking over there, and I’ll keep looking over here,” I said, determined to figure this out on my own. I couldn’t open the hood. How did mechanics replace headlights if not from under the hood? If a car was going to stare at me certainly it did it through its headlights. I’d seen the movies and the commercials. The headlights were always the eyes of an animated car. After several failed attempts to get in to the workings of the front end of the car I sat down to think on a rock beside the headlight. Sitting on the rock brought me eye to eye with the car and I looked into… swag. Soggy, mildewed swag. I nearly jumped with surprise even though it was what I had been trying to do all along. Now I could see why that other geocacher had written what they had. They had probably sat on the very same rock! Tony had said sometimes you have to see a cache from just the right angle. I guess this was one of those. How could I get it loose? I placed my fingers around the chrome around the headlight and jiggled gently. It didn’t budge. I bent down and looked directly into the headlight and I could see a hole toward the back of the plastic housing. Then I noticed the grill was broken and a hand sized hole allowed me to reach right into the headlight. Who in the world had the tools to cut a hole in the side of a headlight without breaking it? I didn’t know but I didn’t question it further. This was working, though the swag was in awful shape. It was obvious that water had worked its way in and took it’s time evaporating out. The log was all one solid chunk after getting wet and drying over and over. It looked like everything needed replacing. I took the log, which basically looked like a little paper pulp brick and walked over to Tony.
“Do we have any extras?” I asked as I handed him the lump.
At first he wasn’t certain what it was, but there were inky spots that were obviously writing.
“Yeah! You found it?”
“Sort of. It found me. I sat on a rock and it was right in front of my face just like that last online log said. But it’s a mess and anything we put in will likely get messed up from the weather.”
“Where is it?” he asked excitedly.
“In the headlight. You just reach through the grill and there’s a hole.”
“Atta girl, partner! You did it!”
“I can’t say this was my all time favorite cache, but the hide is pretty cool. Look! You have to sit on that rock.”
He sat down on the rock and his eyes lit up. “Cool! I think we can even waterproof it a little. If they’d just used a container that would fit through the hole it would have survive just fine.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“For the log? A mini Altoids tin and a baggie. For the swag? I need a closer look. I’m thinking a pill bottle or… larger Altoids tin or a… hmmm, there’s quite a bit in here once you get it all out. We can’t fit all this into a container but a container, even one that only holds tiny things, is better than all this water logged junk. Good find! It’s almost unrecognizable because of all the mold. Let’s see what we can do.”
He pulled out all the swag and paper bits and carried them to the top, or rather the underside, of the car. He found a spot to spread it all out.
“Cache doctor at your service,” he said with a smile.
We totally revamped the cache, despite the likelihood that the cache might never be seen again. Tony had a notepad that he cut in half with a tiny saw on a multi-tool. He wrote: “Replacement log Ill Tidings”, on the cover then signed our names and dated the entry. He placed the half a notepad into a little, zippered, plastic bag made for jewelry, folded the top over so it just fit into a tiny tin. Then he found a spray painted pill bottle in the pack and tried it through the hole in the side of the headlight. It didn’t fit so he tried an Altoids tin. That didn’t fit either, so he tried the tin the log book was in. That one fit so he found another one in the pack and we tried to fit all the swag into the tin. Not much would fit in but we were able to put in a ring, a flat toy car and a keychain. The key chains were very flat and the lid just barely closed with the three things carefully positioned inside. He took a rag out of the pack and cleaned the inside of the headlight as much as he could reach. Then he placed the two tins where they could be seen.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Looks good! I wonder if anybody will find it.”
“I don’t know. But I feel better about the cache anyway. It was worth the sacrifice for the five/five on our Fizzy Grid. Plus we can now post that the cache is in great shape and ready for people to flock up here to find it.”
“Will they?”
“Well… no, but maybe somebody will. Good job!”
“Thanks. This calls for some snack mix.”
“Yeah, I’m getting hungry. Let’s go find a town and some dinner.”
We felt a lot better on the hike back. We snacked on party mix and water and we were able to see downhill across the wide open land.
“Where’s the van?” I asked.
“Probably behind one of those endless hills,” Tony replied.
“I can’t see the highway either.”
“We were a ways off the highway.”
We saw lots of little squirrels. They would dash away and disappear under a bush, then peek out to see if we were coming. If we got too close they ducked inside their burrow until we were gone. Fifteen minutes of walking and we still didn’t see the van.
The snack mix was in dire jeopardy. We ate nearly the whole package on the hike back to the van.
“Dang, it’s nearly six o’clock,” Tony said.
“It can’t be.”
“We were at the mall at noon. Then we drove a half hour to the exit, another fifteen minutes on dirt roads. We hiked a mile, found a geocache, cleaned it up and walked nearly another hour. I guess it’s possible to use up a day like that.”
“Then why don’t we see the van? Or the road?”
“I don’t know. It might have helped to way mark it.”
“How do you way mark the van?” I asked.
“You can way mark anything. We could way mark where we are right now. You just make sure to record the coordinates while you are at the van, then you can look that up later and the GPS will lead you back.”
“Why didn’t we do that?” I asked.
“Because it takes time and all we were doing was hiking a mile in one direction. In fact… let’s see, if we walk directly away from the cache that should point us in the right direction.”
When he looked at where we were in relation to the cache he said, “Oh shoot.”
“What?”
“We’re way off track. We need to head further this way.” He adjusted his direction and set off again, but half an hour later we still didn’t see the van or the road.
“How can we lose the van?” I asked. “Or the road? We went up hill to get to the cache. It should be downhill to the road.”
“I suppose the GPS will lead us back to the cache. Then we can walk and keep to a certain heading to get close to the van again.”
“So much for being hungry. Now we have a handful of party mix and one bottle of water.”
“We’ll be okay,” he said. “The van can’t be far. We know to head downhill. As long as we walk downhill we should reach the road. Then all we have to do is follow the road until we get to the van.”
That’s what I thought, too, except for one small mistake. We didn’t keep an eye on the GPS and when we reached the road we looked at the GPS only to discover that it had run out of power and shut down. We stood at the road a little perplexed.
“Don’t step out there yet,” he said. “If there are recent tracks they could be from the van. If so we need to turn left. If we didn’t cross this spot of the road we should turn right.”
We looked at the road and there were fresh tracks.
“Are those van tracks or somebody else’s?” I asked.
“Tire tracks look a lot alike unless you’re talking mud and snow tires, which we don’t have.”
“But local people might,” I pointed out.
“True. These are not mud and snow tires. These are normal car tires.”
“So…”
“I say we go left.”
“Okay,” I said relieved to have that decision behind us.
We turned left and walked and walked some more. The good news was that we were tiring and so we were walking slowly. The bad news was we were walking away from the van.
After about fifteen minutes of walking I said, “I think we should stop. We need to rest our feet, check the pack and see if we can find some batteries.”
“I don’t think we have any, but we can look,” Tony said.
We sat beside the road and I took off my shoes to let me feet breathe a little and cool off. He unzipped the pack and began taking out swag, the GPS, a handful of Ziploc bags, an extra log book, three spare geocaching containers, Morrison the Moving Moose, a rock, all the swag I’d accumulated from my trades, and down in the very bottom two batteries.
“I wonder if they are spares, or ones we used up and forgot to throw away,” he said.
“There’s only one way to find out.”
He opened up the GPS and used the lid to pry out the dead batteries, then put the new ones in and powered on the device. It took a minute for the GPS to give us the starting menu, but it was obvious we were not going to get much use out of these batteries.
“Quick, bring up the map.”
“We need to lock onto the cache. It forgot the cache when it powered off.”
A few clicks and a short wait and we could see where we were and where the cache was.
“I think if we triangulate the van should be right about… here on the road,” Tony said.
“Yup. Over a mile away. And it’s getting dark.”
“We’ll be okay, now that we’re pointed in the right direction.”
“I wonder how far it is to town.”
“I don’t know.”
I picked up my shoes, ready to set out.
“Aren’t you going to put those on?” Tony asked.
“I will in a minute. If I walk without them for a bit, my feet will thank me for putting them on instead of complaining.”
The sand was sharp on my feet but the walking was pretty easy on the road. It didn’t take long for me to decide that we’d be able to walk faster if I put the shoes on so I stopped and put on my socks and shoes.
“Okay, I’m ready for a hike. Let’s go find that ugly, cacheamolé van.”
We verified we were closing the triangle and quickened our pace. About ten minutes later we heard tires on dirt and turned around to see a pickup truck slowly motoring down the road. We moved to the side to let him pass.
He pulled to a stop, rolled down his widow and asked Tony, “Are you kids okay?”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Though we’re looking for a green van. If you didn’t see it behind you we’re headed in the right direction.”
“I didn’t see it. Hop in the back and we’ll see if it’s up ahead.”
“Thanks.”
Tony climbed into the bed of the truck and offered me a hand up.
“Ever ridden in the bed of a pickup?” he asked.
“No! It’s illegal!”
“I doubt if anybody notices back here. We’ll be fine. Just sit tight and hang on.”
He signaled for the driver to go and the truck pulled out and picked up some speed. Riding in the back of the truck was a bit rough but if I gripped the side of the bed I did okay. I was going to be ready for a shower again after hiking and then sitting in this dusty truck bed. It was still much better than walking all that way. I don’t know how we ended up over a mile in the wrong direction but the driver finally pulled up beside the van and we hopped out.
“Thanks for the ride,” Tony told the driver. “Is there any way we can repay you?”
“No, kid. I was already going this way. Glad to be of help.”
“How far to the next town going west?”
“Fifteen minute drive, tops.”
“Good. Do they have a little motel?”
“Sure enough.”
“Thanks. We can use some dinner and a good night’s rest. Thanks again for the ride!”
The man tipped his baseball cap, waved to me and drove away.
“Well,” Tony said. “That cache earned its five/five rating.”