A Cache Approver
Editor's note: huggy_d1 is a geocacher and part time volunteer cache approver for geocaching.com.)
Rover-r-us and I left Tanglewood Mall (Roanoke, VA) at 6:10am Saturday (give or take) heading to Hickory NC for their cache event (Hickory Nuts ). We returned at 3:50am Sunday (give or take), a few scrapes, cuts, and cache finds later.
The following cache log excerpts are only a brief of what really happened, but it does give you the general flavor of the day.
And so the day goes. A few caches later, I am trying to enter my find log into the PDA's GPXSonar software, and my PDA crashes dead. Completely non-responsive, so I resort to the reset button. Upon reset, it was so scrambled it came up in factory default clean mode. Without a PC and the backup sitting on my home computer, the PDA is basically useless, so I turn it off, and stuff it into my geo-bag. SIGH.. no fault of the GPSr.. was the first time my hacked up PDA had been asked to do so much stuff all at once, and my hacked PDA finally decided to crap out...
A few finds and DNFs later, we arrived at the event at Baker's Mtn. (county)Park about 90 minutes later than planned.
As the sun starts to get lower, my prescription sunglasses begin to interfere with my ability to safely ride. Now I can see on my map that the 'trail' that leads back to where we want to go is getting further and further away from where we are on the map.
It's back to the top to find the right path to that road. It's not safe to ride with the sunglasses, and because I can't see without them, it's not safe at all to ride now.
Dejected, I begin the long push to the top, followed by the expected long push back to the trailhead / car.
Because of the light color of the gravel, I can actually see it's fairly well maintained, and looks rideable provided I go slowly. I adjust my bike's seat height way, way down and adjust my bike's front shock as high as it goes. This set up will be less likely to send me over the handlebar. I begin the descent into foreign territory in the dark with a lot of brake squealing, and foot dragging, and smiles.
I arrive at my car. There is no other car in the lot. There is a note on the windshield from mr007s with the prophetic words, "can't wait to read your logs.” It is now 6:24pm. I see no sign that Rover-R-Us has made it to the car. I get warm clothes on, load the bike onto the car, load other stuff into the car, and stuff fresh batteries into the hungry GPS.
I move my car outside the park gates and call Rover-R-Us on my cell phone (which was in my car). A few seconds later, I hear his phone ringing in the back seat of my car!
Now I see this headlight bopping up the road toward me, and my heart feels a heavy burden lifted. WOOHOOOO! Oh happy tired-a$$ day, and it's only 6:40pm (give or take).
From there, we see yet another cache a few hundred feet away (it's about a tenth of a mile), so we press on.
Now we're climbing rocks where one misstep is a quick fall into the cold creek below. The dew is falling and my glasses are fogged up (yeah, I got my regular glasses out so I could see at night).Finally, we get to the cache.
We're back on plan, and resolve to only seek caches on 'the plan' regardless of how interesting or how close they might be. That proves to be the smartest thing we do all day.
Sometime during all this, we managed to use both of my hiking sticks in a way never intended in order to find a cache and sign the log. Only folks in the area will have an inkling of what that might mean, and even then, they might not be sure. Improvise, adapt, overcome, sign log, and move on.
- 1. If you have a plan, good or not, stick to it.
- 2. If you get a flat tire, it's a sign.
- 3. Do not take any unnecessary risks.
- 4. Take extra batteries.
- 5. Take regular prescription glasses if you are wearing prescription sunglasses.
- 6. Take your cell phones if you have them.
- 7. If you have your 2-way radios, don't leave them in the car (like we did), but take them with you.
- 8. If you are not sure of a path and are in uncertain trails, track log it all, from the time you get out of the car all the way back.
I'm guessing you noticed others, but those are things we learned, relearned, or remembered forgetting at various times throughout the day.
(Author’s note: FYI, we found 33 caches during our trip, so it's not like we had a bad day. On the contrary, it was a fabulous, if not extremely tiring, day. We both hit new high counts for a single day, counting over 600 miles of driving on my car. We don't do it for the numbers. We do it because it's better than sitting on the couch slowly dying day by day. In the process, we inevitably run into obstacles. The memories are created when overcome adversity, and the humility comes in the sharing of what you should have thought to do 3 hours earlier.)
