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| What do you reckon that old fart is doing up there?! |
12,000 geocaches, that is.
Team No Dead Weight, consisting of the usual pandemic-era suspects — Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott), Fishdownthestair (a.k.a. Natalie) and Old Rodan (a.k.a. me) — gathered again today for a customary Sunday on the trail. This time, we headed back to the Carolina North Forest in Chapel Hill, where a passel of relatively new geocaches awaited our unique brand of attention. We’d been there a few weeks ago, and — wouldn’t you know it — an hour after we departed the forest, a bunch of new caches were published, right in the same area we had been hiking.
The forest occupies 750 acres of land on either side of Seawell School Road, which runs north/south on the northwest side of Chapel Hill. I have hiked/geocached in the forest numerous times over the years, but today was the first time I basically hiked roughly the entire perimeter of the forest. Most of today’s caches were pretty simple, requiring few feats of acrobatic prowess, although I did go up a tree I had already negotiated some years ago just so I could help Ms. Natalie reach the cache, an older one that hangs in a fairly high place.
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| Scott performing minor acrobatic feats |
So, yep, we cleared out every cache we had yet to find in both sections of the forest — fifteen there or about, requiring roughly seven miles of hiking. The temperature hovered around 95 the whole day, and the humidity made it feel like we were breathing mayonnaise. But we persevered, and figured that, after completing the hike in the forest, we would call it a day.
But wouldn’t you know it... just before we set out for our respective homesteads, Natalie realized four brand-new caches had been published, a relatively short distance from the forest, along the Booker Creek Greenway, which Ms. B. and I have hiked together on occasion. The new caches had been live for about three hours, but no one had logged them as found. So we set out after them, hoping we might snag the coveted first-to-find (FTF) honors.
What do you know? We did! How happy. We finished the day having put in very close to 9 miles of hoofing it; some pretty rugged, some relatively easy. The heat just about did us in, though. I mean, whew! Adding ithe handful I found in Mebane while coming and going, my current geocache count stands at 11,991. So, I figure I will pick up eight caches this week and, on Sunday, plot an outing for some slightly more-extravagant-than-customary cache for #12K. I am leaning toward either one way up in a tree or deep in the underground.
The plotting thickens.
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| Natalie seems to find the cache log amusing. |
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| One of many large mounds that rise out of the forest like little mountains |
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| A little Bigfoot cave, I’m pretty sure. |
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| Old Rodan watching for little Bigfeet on the prowl |
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| “Knee-to-Knee” sculpture in the brand-new Mebane Community Park |