Geek On The Mountain

I went out geocaching this weekend for the first time this year today. In fact, I think it’s the first time I’ve gone in almost a year. I didn’t really get around to doing it much last year at all. I don’t talk about it much, so if it so happens that you don’t know what geocaching is, it’s basically a treasure hunt type game involving a GPS receiver and (usually) the woods. The website explains it all.

I ended up hitting two caches, though I went to one twice. The first/last cache was in a swampy area of a nearby park. I think my GPSR must have been frozen when I started using it though, so I couldn’t find it (OK, so I walked right by it but I had no idea if I was anywhere close). Actually, when I first turned it one the other day, it couldn’t find any satellites at all, even after being on, outside, for like 20 minutes. The batteries were low so I replaced those and then it was able to pick up the signals just fine and dandy. When I got to the swampy cache though, I noticed that my error rating was 200-300 feet….it should be around 30 feet. A 30 foot radius leaves 2800 square feet to search. It gets you close, but the work certainly isn’t over. A 200 foot radius leaves over 125,000 square feet to search through. A bit too much for one person. Especially a bit too much when walking more than 5 feet in any direction involves carefully stepping over fallen trees and avoiding mud holes. I went back home after giving up once and even at home (I have a waypoint set at my house) it read me as being 45 feet away. (I’m pretty sure I marked the waypoint in the front of my house, but if I did it out back then I would have been off by about that much. At any rate, 45 feet off isn’t too bad) Unfortunately, it still gave me an error reading of 150 feet. Maybe it was just calculating it’s error rate incorrectly? I dropped it on our swing and went around to the side of the house to wash my boots off. When I came back a few minutes later the error rating had dropped to normal levels and it’s been fine since. I ended up going back to the swampy cache and still had trouble finding it, but I eventually did. (I’m guessing that not a whole lot of readers will find this cache so I won’t mind giving away spoilers…) It was inventively hidden inside of a log that had been cut in half, hollowed, and hinged. Coolest yet, inside I found a couple of cool rocks. One is an amethyst and the other is umm, I have no idea. The picture does it no justice though, as the color shifts if you rotate it. Usually cache’s have crap in them. I’ve found few (though I’m all the way up to 16 found now….I didn’t do it much last year as you may have gathered) with much of anything worthwhile inside. I had actually planned on just writing in the log and going, but I couldn’t pass these babies up. It’s defintely the best thing I’ve found in a cache.

The second cache was the exact opposite of difficult, which was nice after the other one. I was actually a micro-cache that was hidden in a tree near a historical marker about 30 feet off the road. I don’t drive by there often, but I’d never even noticed the marker. Apparently there used to be another town there but Mount Pleasant here overran it over 100 years ago. Kind of interesting.

The swampy cache reminding me of something important. I suck at geocaching. Specifically, I suck at finding things. I have a hard enough time finding crap around the house! Oh well. Maybe I’ll get better…

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