Fear Is the Mind-Killer...

There's a geocache — and a geocacher — up in the tree.
Can you see her?

...To quote Dune. Or perhaps it's that a little dose of fear is merely a useful... necessary... instrument for self-preservation. A wall, of sorts, where remaining on one side of it might be considered healthy and sane, crossing it might not.

A bit of all of these things, I would say.

I'm all about some tree climbing — within reason, of course. I have hidden lots of my geocaches in trees, some that are fairly challenging to negotiate. I have also gone after quite a few, and quite happily, that seriously stretched the limits of my physical abilities.

For a couple of them, I just decided to say, "I'm not that crazy." There is this wonderful cache just up the road that, at the very least, challenges one's physical abilities, and is, in its way, educational ("Up, Up, and Away," GC4CB1N). For example, I learned that my comfort level for going up a sturdy, very vertical tree is about forty to fifty feet. In this tree, however, the cache resides at a point some sixty to seventy feet straight up. Now, I've done many more difficult climbs, but generally within that forty to fifty foot threshold. I have to credit the cache hider, Mr. Rich "Night-Ranger" Colter, with either considerable bravery or outright lunacy — as I do Ms. Debbie "Cupdaisy" Shoffner, who went all the way up to the hide this morning and signed our names to the log.

About 11 AM, we headed out to ground zero and started up that big sucker. The climbing wasn't bad, but sure enough, about forty feet or so up there, my arm muscles started sending me distinct signals that proceeding farther might be foolhardy; a little disheartening, but I opted to take them seriously. Anyway, the last time retrieving a cache required some climbing, I did the honors — much to her dismay, since Cupdaisy is an accomplished tree-monkey and it riles her when someone steals her thunder. In no uncertain terms, she put forth that I owed her a bleeping tree. So, today proved to be the perfect time to graciously pay my debt to her. I opted to make my way earthward and take some pictures while she was still high up there in the sky.

That is my story, and I am sticking to it.

Click the images to enlarge.

In the tree, about 30 feet up, looking up

You can actually see Cupdaisy in this shot; she's about fifteen feet below the cache.

Cupdaisy coming down, here about ten feet above the ground — home free, log successfully signed.