Excited and nervous, and feeling a little like James Bond, I pulled into the parking spot near the first cache of the day, Ampersand Swimming Hole . A “suit” in a car from CT looked at me like I was a yeti or an alien as I got out of a perfectly good car, and walked into the weather towards treasure hidden in the woods.
My first day of geocaching was April 4, 2004…a Saturday (I planned on going after 6 that first day). I’d been getting ready for 2 weeks, printing out cache-listings for my area, working the kinks out of my gear, and explaining the concept to my doubtful wife. I got out of work at 3pm on Friday, the 3rd, went to sleep eventually, and woke up to a blizzard that would end up dumping about 8 inches of snow during the course of the day on my part of the Adirondack Park.
There were already a couple of feet of snow in the woods, and the ¾ mile hike was slow going. When I finally got my GPSr zeroed out, it seemed to indicate that the cache was 20 feet out in the water (something the listing assured me was not the case); so I made my way up and down the shore looking for places I would hide Tupperware if I felt so inclined. Eventually I found the cache, signed the log, traded treasures, and slogged back to my Jeep, my clothes and hair stiff with cold, a grin on my face, and a song in my heart; I was completely hooked.
The next cache, Ampersand View , was hidden only about 15 feet from where I parked my car, but took some serious looking before I found it. The view was, and is, spectacular, although I felt completely exposed whenever cars drove by (I was sure they would stop and ask me what I was doing, or call the cops, but nobody paid any attention to me). I found, I signed, I traded, and I moved on (after slurping some water, candy and beef jerky down, listening to NPR in my Jeep).
My third cache of the day, RPA-15 Stony Creek , was near some water I paddle each summer, but I had never hiked in the woods there before. I found the trail, and post-holed my way into the woods (creeping lightly across the crust, breaking through every once in a while, which sent me crashing down up to me knee or further...oh, what I’d give for snowshoes right now). I had signal trouble on this cache, and had to walk back and forth, trying to get a good read on the coordinates. The cache was well hidden, and at a different altitude (I’ll say no more, even under threat of torture!) than the previous two caches, but soon enough I was logging, trading, and trying to Zen my way back across the snow-crust to my car (“be light, float across the snow like a moonbeam, my coat and pack are filled with helium” and so on…).
My fourth, and as it would turn out final, cache of the day is still one of my favorite finds to date: Adirondack Rat Pack Cache . It turned out to be an incredibly long way in, based on my memory of the area, and I didn’t want to bushwhack through waist deep snow and crust (especially after the last cache). I walked along the shore of Rat Pond, imagining what this cache would be like once I found it.
It’s hard to explain the synergy of high-tech and low-tech, of cerebral and muscular, of community and independence that makes geocaching such a great way to spend your free-time, but if you’ve ever spent a day like my first day of geocaching, you know what I mean. The crust broke beneath me at a marshy corner of the shore and both boots splashed in and filled with ice and water. My GPSr read only 400 feet to the cache, so I threw some more candy down my throat, and pushed on. The cache was pretty easy to find and was bigger than the other three combined; it was filled with all sorts of (to my eye) great stuff. I huddled in the shelter provided by some rocks, and wrote my last log of my first day of geocaching; I took a tiny rubber duck (which I still have), and left a ton of stuff (out of appreciation and to lighten my load as I stiffened up, tired and cold).
That first day of geocaching was both terrific and terrible, I got home bone-tired and had to cut the laces off my boots to get them off (my fingers were stiff, and the laces were solid with ice), and still I couldn’t stop smiling.
My wife thought I was stupid on a number of levels, I guess she was right, but I had one of the best days of my life; hunting for treasure strangers had hidden in the woods for me to find. It’s hard to explain the synergy of high-tech and low-tech, of cerebral and muscular, of community and independence that makes geocaching such a great way to spend your free-time, but if you’ve ever spent a day like my first day of geocaching, you know what I mean.
