Caching Crew and the Blustery Day

Up with the sun on this frigid and windy morning to get over to Ringgold, VA, northeast of Danville, where a group of about 25 geocachers set to work cleaning up the Shawnee Road trailhead for the Danville & Richmond rail trail. I'd been out there hiking and biking lately (Pastorale, Triskaphobia, Where the Hell Are the Undead?) and found that the trailhead had become a regular garbage dump. I'd decided it needed a touch of CITO (cache in, trash out), and the idea caught on with the Southside VA Geocachers' group. So this morning, a good hours' work turned the rubbish heap into a new, pristine bit of woodland, so that finding even a scrap of trash now might be quite the daunting challenge. There was a ton of it out there, to be sure—mostly unremarkable, but I did find an interesting bit: a pink suitcase full of porn. No, I shit you not. It was so waterlogged and heavy, it took two of us to haul it to sponsor Keith McCoy's truck.

Naturally, we're trusting Keith to do the right thing with it.

After the cleanup and a fine brunswick stew lunch at the McCoys' Corner Cafe in Ringgold, several of us set out to hunt a number of caches in the Danville area. A few highly creative hides out there, my favorite being one that involved some serious physical challenges (see pics and video below). Cold and windy out there, I gotta tell you. This, though, is what caching is all about. And all the folks who volunteered to spend a portion of their day improving a natural area are a credit to their respective communities.

Click on pics to enlarge.

Preparing to haul away the fruits of the morning's labor

Not for the faint of heart!

Also not for the faint of heart! Yep, there's a cache container up there.

After the cache has been replaced, it is determined that Damned Rodan must ascend
and make adjustments. Done and done.

The team of daredevils


Damned Rodan's ascent caught on video.