It's one of those days when the compulsion to go hiking grabbed me before I even got out of bed. In the absence of any new nearby trail geocaches, there was nothing for it but to go maintain a cache or two of my own... and undertake some good, old-fashioned wandering about. I got going pretty early, my sights set on one of my oldest cache hides — "Threading the Needle" (GC1EQD2) — about 1.5 miles out on the Reedy Fork Trail along Lake Townsend. The cache itself, which I placed in July 2008, turned out to be in excellent condition, considering its age. I also decided to wander about the woods, thinking I might be able to rediscover the container from the very first night cache I ever hunted.
That cache was called "Bedtime Story" (GC112D8). A few friendly reprobates and I hunted it in April 2008, and what an
entertaining experience that turned out to be! (If you're feeling masochistic,
an account of this adventure may be found
here.)
Nowadays, I keep detailed notes of all my cache finds, including the
coordinates to the final stages of multi and puzzle caches, but in those early
days of geocaching, such a helpful notion had not occurred to me, and it
wasn't until 2012 that
geocaching.com added the capability
to store such information on the cache pages. So, I have only dim memory to
draw on as far as the location of the final container, which was an ammo can
hidden under a prodigious deadfall not far from the lake bank.
Today, since I was a long way out on the trail where "Bedtime Story" is hidden, I took it upon myself to go looking for it. Now, without having access to its coordinates, I knew it'd be something of a crapshoot. And I really don't even know if the cache is hidden where it used to be; the cache owner, Ranger Fox, has changed things up with it over the years. Still, I decided to follow a few hunches and see whether I might find myself somewhere that might look familiar enough to lead me to the hide.
The long and short of it is that I did not. However, I had a great time
finding many of the old reflector tacks that led you to the different stages
of the cache. Some of those are still usable for the cache's current
incarnation, some are probably not. On one of my side trips off the trail, I
happened upon a big-ass barrel near the lakefront, which aroused my curiosity,
but I did not attempt to pry it open because you never know when a big-ass
barrel in the woods might contain a flesh-eating zombie. I mean, it has
happened. Remember Return of the Living Dead! Like hell I'm gonna go down that road!
Anyway, I fit in a good 3.5 miles of hiking, much of it in fairly rugged
terrain. So now I has a tired. Got real writing to do, so off I go!
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| Tis mighty swampy out yonder |
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| Odd little lean-to I happened upon; probably someone's makeshift duck blind |