Beyond the Gate

Today was the day to attempt a new geocaching milestone: geocache find #12,000. For this outing, the Socially Distanced No Dead Weight Irregulars — Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott), Fishdownthestair (a.k.a. Natalie), and the old radioactively mutated flying rubber prehistoric reptile — welcomed friend NCBiscuit (a.k.a. Linda) to our ranks as we went after a nice tunnel hide in Durham, NC, called “Beyond the Gate” (GC5C0C4), placed several years ago by friend Vortexecho (a.k.a. Christian). Ground Zero is a lovely location, which you see in the photo above, and it’s right behind the apartment complex where my daughter lived after she graduated college, back in... well... a handful of years ago. The pipe is big, so once inside it, we could easily walk upright. We found the biggest challenge to be wriggling through that broken gate. The pipe isn’t very long — maybe a hundred feet — but it sure is wet in there. You end up in a drain out in the middle of a pond.

Inside that pipe, I encountered the biggest crawdude I’ve seen since I was a kid, when I loved playing in the creek across from our house in Martinsville. He measures almost six inches long there. He proved friendly enough, though he was not at all an enthusiastic conversationalist. So as not to upset him needlessly, I avoided mentioning that crawdad is one of my favorite delicacies.

After completing the deed at “Beyond the Gate,” we shrugged off the increasingly oppressive heat and moved on to a nearby cache that has been in the wild for several days but has yet to be found. It isn’t meant to be especially difficult, but a number of geocachers have been unable to locate it. Count us among them. After a diligent, fairly lengthy search, we were forced to give up in frustration.

Some old fellow hanging around in the dark

From there, Ms. NCBiscuit departed, leaving the regular Irregulars to strike out after a number of caches along the American Tobacco Trail. Hoo, doggies, was it ever hot and ugly out there! We decided to end our day at another of Vortexecho’s tunnel caches, but unfortunately, claiming a find on this one was not to be. LV-426 (GC4YJFD) lurks deep inside a series of very tight culverts, requiring either crawling or very constricted duck-walking. I opted for the latter. Once way down deep inside, though, we encountered some smoky fumes oozing from a couple of pipes — one of the inevitable hazards of such locations — and decided to abandon our search. Never let it be said we are irredeemably foolhardy. Merely foolish.

That ended our adventure for the day, although before coming back home, I had to get even hotter and filthier helping Brugger put up a new mailbox in front of her house, since the old one was by all rights condemned. That done, I finally made it home and fell into the shower, for which every organism within a hundred feet of the property thanked me profusely.

It was a day.

Beyond the gate at “Beyond the Gate”

Old Rodan and VERY Old Diefenbaker

Heat be hot!