I don’t generally log DNFs, mostly because I’m impatient. I’m just not the kind of cacher who hunts for an hour or more to find a well-hidden container; I’d rather just go find another cache. That being the case, I don’t feel that it’s fair to say that I didn’t find the cache; it’s more that I didn’t really look for it. I use other peoples’ DNFs on my hides as a trigger to go out and make sure that the cache is still there, and in cases where I might have found the cache if I really looked, I feel a little unfair logging a DNF for just that reason. The story below is about the only DNF currently on my gc.com account, Hurrah Pass.

I was out in Moab, Utah last summer for a friend’s wedding, and had loaded a bunch of caches into my GPSr and my PDA in anticipation of some geocaching during my visit. I headed out of town by 10 am one morning (I had planned to leave earlier, but we had stayed up late the night before), and it already felt like I was standing in front of an open oven door (unbelievably hot and dry to my Adirondack-Winter-tempered thermostat).

I was planning on hunting for a number of caches in the canyon country around Moab, and had my rental car loaded with water, jerky, Gatorade, and hard-candy. I found the first few with little difficulty, and then headed out a series of smaller and less traveled roads, and away from the things of man, to find Hurrah Pass.

My Topozone map showed that I could drive almost to the cache, which would have been great as the steering-wheel was hot enough to raise blisters when I got back into the car after finding each cache. I drove into Kane Springs Canyon without any problem, but once the road started climbing towards the pass, it rapidly degraded to a jeep trail and then to tracks over red-rock. I dinged and scraped my way a little further, but was finally too worried about having the car break down to continue. I was about 9 “crow-flight” miles from Moab by this time, but it would have been at least twice that on foot in direct sun with less than a gallon of drinking-water left (in early August)…so I parked and walked the rest of the way up to Hurrah Pass.

It was a couple of hundred vertical feet to the cache-site from where I parked, spread out over a half-mile or more across the winding red-rock trail. I got to the top, sipped some “soup-temperature” water from my backpack,My last sip of water, and the maroon-ish color of my normally fair skin signaled the official end of my hunt; I walked back down to my car...and headed back into town, a little disgusted with myself. and started to look for the cache. I looked for more than an hour, sometimes stopping to hide in the shade for a couple of minutes and sip at my shrinking reserves of water. I tried circling the target area, using my compass from a distance, turning off the GPSr and restarting it, looking in places good/bad/ugly (ever mindful of the multitude of bitey, ouchy, stingy things living in the high dessert).

I couldn’t find the cache, and I wouldn’t give up because it had taken a lot out of me to get here, and I knew I wouldn’t ever come back again. My last sip of water, and the maroon-ish color of my normally fair skin signaled the official end of my hunt; I walked back down to my car (ran the AC for 5 minutes before I could breathe in it) and headed back into town, a little disgusted with myself.

I have fond memories of that cache-hunt (equal amounts of aggressive rehydration and the passage of time have given my recollections of that day a rosy tint), and am proud of having searched and failed in this instance. Tons of people have found the cache since, so I know it was there that day (although I can’t imagine where). It was certainly one of my favorite caching experiences because, not despite the fact that, it was “the one that got away”.