![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Geoscratchless!
Sep. 4th, 2010 05:49 pmGot up late today and was bumming around the house, accomplishing nothing, so I decided to go out and do some geocaching. Looked for four, only found two. A good average for baseball, less so for geocaching.
The first of the two that I missed was at Cather Lake, a small, narrow lake which lies just off Jingle Pot Road. Houses back onto it on both sides, with small strips of greenspace at each end of the lake. And I mean really small, maybe 10m wide by 50m long. The cache was located in the middle of the strip at the northwest end of the lake. The hint said "rock". There were two small boulders at the GPS coords so I poked and prodded around them for a few minutes but came up empty handed. I gave up pretty quickly because I felt so obvious and exposed since I was visible from all of the nearby backyards. This is a problem I often have with caches in urban settings. It's the first time I've seen Cather Lake, though, so that was nice.
The second miss was of a more annoying sort. It was just off the Parkway Trail, which runs alongside the highway, and the hint said simply "tall grass". There was lots of tall grass about and a road worker was out cutting some of it down while I was there. It's bad enough to give such a non-specific clue, but to use something ephemeral like grass is just dumb.
The two finds made up for the misses, though. The first one was is hidden in plain view, I just had be standing in the right place to see it. I like those kinds of caches as they really make me rethink what it means for something to be "hidden". It doesn't necessarily have to be covered up.
For the second find the cache itself and its hiding place were nothing special, but the general area was interesting. It was in a small clearing far enough from the highway to muffle the traffic noise. Scattered about the clearing where the rusting remains of a handful of old cars and trucks. I know that it's someone's old garbage, but unlike glass or plastic at least steel is relatively easy for nature to reclaim. And there's little enough of it left now that what remains gains something of an air of mystery and antiquity.
But the big news from the outing was that I managed not to lacerate myself on brambles. I got a few pricks while poking around for caches, but my dermis remained intact! Maybe by this time next week it will no longer look like I got into a knife fight with a midget.
My cache count now stands at 115.
The first of the two that I missed was at Cather Lake, a small, narrow lake which lies just off Jingle Pot Road. Houses back onto it on both sides, with small strips of greenspace at each end of the lake. And I mean really small, maybe 10m wide by 50m long. The cache was located in the middle of the strip at the northwest end of the lake. The hint said "rock". There were two small boulders at the GPS coords so I poked and prodded around them for a few minutes but came up empty handed. I gave up pretty quickly because I felt so obvious and exposed since I was visible from all of the nearby backyards. This is a problem I often have with caches in urban settings. It's the first time I've seen Cather Lake, though, so that was nice.
The second miss was of a more annoying sort. It was just off the Parkway Trail, which runs alongside the highway, and the hint said simply "tall grass". There was lots of tall grass about and a road worker was out cutting some of it down while I was there. It's bad enough to give such a non-specific clue, but to use something ephemeral like grass is just dumb.
The two finds made up for the misses, though. The first one was is hidden in plain view, I just had be standing in the right place to see it. I like those kinds of caches as they really make me rethink what it means for something to be "hidden". It doesn't necessarily have to be covered up.
For the second find the cache itself and its hiding place were nothing special, but the general area was interesting. It was in a small clearing far enough from the highway to muffle the traffic noise. Scattered about the clearing where the rusting remains of a handful of old cars and trucks. I know that it's someone's old garbage, but unlike glass or plastic at least steel is relatively easy for nature to reclaim. And there's little enough of it left now that what remains gains something of an air of mystery and antiquity.
But the big news from the outing was that I managed not to lacerate myself on brambles. I got a few pricks while poking around for caches, but my dermis remained intact! Maybe by this time next week it will no longer look like I got into a knife fight with a midget.
My cache count now stands at 115.
