That scary fellow in the photo there is a tired but very satisfied Mr. Rodan after finishing up the restoration of "Darkness Falls" (GC14WGB) this evening (see "Restoring 'Darkness Falls,' February 21). It took several trips and many miles of hiking to get it all done, but I came out of the woods about nine o'clock this evening with the whole thing finally put to bed. It's ready to be hunted again, and I hope my efforts do justice to the original, classic Darth Sketcher hide. The old containers all had seen better days, and a couple of them were beyond repair; at least one container was missing altogether.
Night caching is a unique treat. The hides are generally set up where you follow reflectors from one stage to another until you reach the final container. "Darkness Falls" is spread out over five different trails, each involving short- to medium-distance hikes, and there are no reflectors to find until you're very close to the stages themselves. Some of them are fairly straightforward, a couple are rather tricky. To access the contents of the final container, hunters must collect and decipher the information they have gathered from the preceding stages. The chances of actually finding the cache in daylight are slim.
I did enjoy tonight's final outing, as I found three other caches as well, one of them ostensibly a canoe/kayak cache, though it was accessible — only just — from the lake shore. That one had gone missing some time ago, and the container had been replaced; however, the container I found, half-buried amid the muck along the lake bank, was the original, which had not been found since August 2010. Ironically, I could not find the newer replacement container.
I also brought home the first tick of the season. Since the spiders are all out there in prodigious numbers — their eyes glow beautifully in the darkness when your flashlight beam hits them — I guess it would stand to reason, but since we had the deep freeze to end all deep freezes just over a week ago, I didn't anticipate the little assholes being out there already. Who knew?
Anyway, go play in the dark. It's fun.
