Sunday, December 8, 2024

High Above Rocky Mount and Stuck by Stickers

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.
Looking down the slope from GZ

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....
Close to the edge
A target-rich location
High above the town of Rocky Mount, VA