Several years ago, Ms. B. and I had climbed a huge, rock-crowned ridge in Rocky
Mount, VA, to hunt for a geocache. It's a cool location, with panoramic views of
the area, and the rocks are all covered with flat, low-growing cactus. On that
first trip up there, I found the cache, but it was archived at some point
afterward.
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Looking down the slope from GZ
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This past year, a different geocacher placed a new cache up there, but it had
only been found a time or two before it went missing. Friend
Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott) and I had ventured up there to hunt
it, but by then, it was already gone. Happily, the cache was recently
replaced, so I decided to drive up to Rocky Mount again this morning to give
it another look-see.
The ridge is very steep and slick with dead leaves, so getting up to ground
zero made for a fair physical challenge. Then, once I reached the top, I
inadvertently stuck my hand into a cluster of cactus, so I've been trying to
extract thousands of little piss-ant cactus needles for the past several
hours, and in some cases, it has been an exercise in futility. To be sure,
ground zero is a target-rich area, with countless clusters of rocks, trees,
logs, nooks, crannies, etc., that might hide a geocache — especially a pill
bottle, like this one.
I was up there hunting for so long, I eventually reached out to the cache
hiders for a hint. Even once they provided one, it took me a long time to find
the thing. The coordinates are pretty far off, so I shot some new ones and
posted them with my log for the benefit of future hunters. Anyway, at long
last, mission accomplished.
Afterward, I found lunch at the nearby
Rocky Mount Smokehouse — a fairly decent pulled pork sandwich with deep-fried corn on the cob on the
side, which was interesting enough. Then I cruised over to nearby Ferrum, my
old alma mater, where I roamed about for a while before heading back home.
Now, if I could just get the last coupla thousand cactus needles out of my
hand....
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| Close to the edge |
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A target-rich location
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High above the town of Rocky Mount, VA
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