Geocaching and Technoflopping

After a long, sometimes torturous trip back from Georgia yesterday, I'd just as soon have stayed home all day, but I had a doctor's appointment in Greensboro this morning that I really couldn't miss. So, to soften the blow, I got hold of geocaching partners Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott) and Fishdownthestairs (a.k.a. Natalie) and arranged for an afternoon geocaching trip to the Cane Creek Mountains Natural Area just south of Burlington, NC, where several relatively new geocaches awaited us. After my appointment, I snagged a delicious lunch at Thai Corner Kitchen in Greensboro and then hit the road for our caching destination.

Things began swimmingly enough. It was a lovely new trail system, and the caches proved to be nicely done. We hadn't gone but so far, though, when my phone screen decided to die on me. No, this did not help with navigation in the woods. The phone had power, obviously, but nothing I did would activate the bastard, conniving screen again. I suspected the problem was simply the phone brightness, but why it suddenly decided to default to zero, I had no idea. Now, my phone is old and sometimes cranky. But this was way over-the-top cranky. Fortunately, my caching partners had properly functioning phones, so we managed to find all our target caches and get out of the woods without undue difficulty.

Sure enough, once out where sunlight could reach my phone, I could dimly see the standard icons on my screen, and I was able to restore it to the proper brightness. I suppose I'll need to pick up a new phone sooner than later—as will Ms. B., since we both got these at the same time, which was just before our late-2019 trip to Europe. So, at over six years old, I guess these devices can retire with something akin to honor.

I guess that's just a matter of getting 'er done. Whenever.

Our favorite cache of the day lurked in the ruins on ancient cabin in the woods

High Above the Cane Creek Mountains

Today was a geocaching day for me, and a hot one at that (the heat index hit over 100 degrees out there). I headed down early this morning to meet a couple of the No-Dead-Weight Irregulars—friends Debbie (a.k.a. Cupdaisy) and Scott (a.k.a. Diefenbaker)—at the Cane Creek Mountains Natural Area, a few miles south of Burlington, NC. There were six newish caches on the hiking trails, which range from moderate to rugged; we managed to find them all and put in a little over three miles on the trail.

For me, the highlight of the hike was reaching the relatively new Monadnock Observation Tower, which rises 80 feet above the treeline at the summit of the mountain, offering some stunning 360-degree views of Alamance County. At first sight, the tower doesn't look all that tall, but after a 1.5-mile, semi-strenuous hike, plodding up those hot metal stairs took some doing. I hung out up there taking pictures as long as I could stand it—about ten minutes—for that sun was blazing. At least below, we were mostly under tree cover.

 

Once done at Cane Creek, we drove up to Mebane to have lunch at Catrina's Tequila & Taco Bar, our favorite Mexican restaurant in the area. The steak and chorizo street tacos with diabla salsa are to die (or maybe even kill) for. And the margaritas are mighty good (unlike so many places, they have a decent amount of tequila in them).

 

After lunch, we went after a handful of nearby park & grab caches, and I finally headed home. And now I'm gonna sit back, have a beer, and wilt, for the heat is hot.

Back on the Geocaching Trail

Here you see Two Old Farts (Old Rodan, left, and Old Diefebnaker, right) wondering what the hell kind of curve balls life has been throwing at them. Our longtime third wheel, Old Rob, is facing a profoundly critical time, and another of our best geocaching friends, Night-Hawk (a.k.a. Tom) is in a different but potentially equally serious place. All of us are struggling to come to grips with these facts in our own ways. All this comes amid the biggest life change Brugger and I have willfully undertaken since we decided to share space in each other’s lives going on fourteen years ago.

Change comes hard.

During the month of May, I made exactly four geocaching trips, two no more than quick jaunts, and this constitutes the least amount of caching in a month’s time since the genesis of my geocaching days back in 2008. For all these years, caching has been an ongoing and what I would call the most immersive and invigorating activity of my adult life. For both Old Rob and Night-Hawk, geocaching has been a defining aspect of their personalities.

Anyway, today, Scott and I ventured forth to the Cane Creek Mountains Natural Area just south of Burlington. A new trail system has opened up (the Oak Hill Trails) adjacent to the original area (Pine Hill Trails). Eventually, the two will connect. Anyway, four new caches recently came out on the Oak Hill Trails, so Scott and I took it as our task to go out and hunt them. We did this thing, found two other newish caches in Burlington proper, and then did the Simply Thai lunch thing in Elon, as tradition demanded.

Ms. B. and I have plenty of tasks piled up to conquer, so this evening, we’re conquering them. Well parts of them. Big parts. Or at least medium-size parts.

Parts is parts.

Lovely little picnic area in the foundation of an old cabin

The Giant Claw

A little dam and reservoir hiding in the woods near the trail

View from below the dam

Little Mountain Falls, Cane Creek Mountain, and More

I don't think my knees — and possibly the rest of me — have been this worn out for a while. At least not since I went up Grassy Hill Ridge in Rocky Mount, VA, for a geocache several weeks ago (“Oh, My Achin Feetz,” Feb. 21, 2022). On Friday, I departed Greensboro early in the day, bound for Fairy Stone Park, VA, where a couple of newish caches — one traditional (“A Bench with a View #4” GC9PFKB) and one EarthCache (“Little Mountain Falls” GC9EDWH) — lay in wait for me. The steep and sometimes rugged terrain at Fairy Stone has many times both done me a world of good and damn near done me in. The hike on Friday afternoon was far from the longest I’ve undertaken there, but the elevation changes along the way presented both my legs and my lungs with a healthy challenge. There’s a plenty of up and down both ways, but for the most part, the outbound journey was primarily downhill, leaving the rigorous uphill trek for the return. The scenery in this particular corner of the world is gorgeous, even between seasons as we are. Give it a couple of weeks, and these woods will be as green and lush as a rain forest. In autumn, the colors, as I can testify from considerable experience, are stunning. Little Mountain Falls isn’t especially huge, but the stream trickles down numerous tiers from a significant height — considerably higher than the photograph on the left can capture.

Happily, I found the caches I sought and lived to hike another day. Indeed, I was soon back at it, this time on a regular Sunday geocaching outing with a pair of old farts (friends Diefenbaker, a.k.a. Scott, and Old Rob, a.k.a. Old Rob) at the Cane Creek Mountain Preserve in Alamance County. The hike here, while quite pleasant, was not as strenuous as the one at Fairy Stone. Mind you, it could have been, had we dragged Robert up the mountain to find a number of caches he had not yet claimed. However, since Scott and I both had already found those, Rob declined, ostensibly to save us from undertaking a rugged hike for caches we had already found. When it comes down to it, I’m reasonably certain Old Rob simply didn’t cotton to the idea of having cardiac arrest until he had found all the other caches we had targeted for this trip. At Cane Creek, we found one cache relatively quickly, while the other required an inordinate amount of time searching due to mercilessly bouncing coordinates. In the end, though... happily... we prevailed.

Once done at Cane Creek, we zipped over to the nearby community of Swepsonville, where a relatively short trek on the trail took us to another newish cache. Here, our quarry was easily found and required no hairy terrain stunts to reach. However, I kind of wanted to undertake a hairy terrain stunt, and since the the opportunity was there, with Mr. Scott’s assistance, I availed myself to it (see the photo at right). And then, on to nearby Mebane we went, where we found a couple of more relatively easy hides and then busted the hell out of some lunch at the excellent Catrina's Mexican Restaurant, which Ms. B. had recommended following a visit during one of her artsy-fartsy-craftsy retreats in that area. Ms. B. done good with her recommendation.

Next week... believe it or not, I foresee more hiking and caching. Until then, this is your host, Damned Rodan, saying—

Three Old Farts — Old Rodan, Old Rob, Old Diefenbaker — at the Haw River in Swepsonville

Rusty Wreck & Others

It’s almost a pity the geocache wasn’t way up yonder on that fire tower. Well, emphasis on “almost.” I’m always keen on a good physical challenge, and I’ve been up a rickety-ass fire tower before (see “Beating the Devil and Haw, Haw, Haw,” 12/22/2013), but with four flights of stairs missing and only a bit of rust holding the girders together, this one might have been a little dangerous.

With the weather blessedly again conducive to a geocaching outing (a tad warmer than yesterday, at that), the Socially Distant No-Dead-Weight Irregulars — Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott), Fishdownthestair (a.k.a. Natalie), and I — decided to go after three relatively new geocaches at the Cane Creek Mountains Natural Area, not far south of Burlington. We rendezvoused at the parking area at 10:00 this morning, where we discovered friends David & Diana (a.k.a. David & Diana), NCBiscuit (a.k.a. Linda), and Ms. Biscuit’s cache hound Dotty on site. Their caching plans turned out to be identical to ours, so we resolved to combine forces and attack the trail with guns a-blazing. At two of the three caches, all those guns came in handy. Sadly, not at the first of them, which has, by all indications, flown the coop. Happily, we did find the other two, and those, at least, took us to a couple of interesting locations. See the fire tower image above.

The most fun one was “Rusty Wreck” GC95K2D (which wasn’t actually the fire tower). Since I started geocaching in 2008, I have marveled at the sheer number of cars and trucks that appear to have spontaneously grown in the deep woods. The one we found today must have been there a long, long time, as it appeared to be 1950s vintage. The cache itself proved quite a challenge, but find it we did, and we loved the hunt. Nearby, there was a ramshackle shelter, no doubt for the drunken-most set, given the massive number of beer cans congregating around it. It’s literally right next to the trail, so I hope it is not regularly inhabited.

And all that made for another much-needed, very welcome outing in the woods. We put in something between four and five miles in rather rugged terrain (particularly on our way to the fire tower, which required a very long, very steep ascent), so this old not-quite-a-geezer has the sore feets and wee bit of tired.

Laters.

One guess where this guy got his driver’s license....

Somewhat less than five-star accommodations here

A view from high atop the ridge

Back down in the lowlands

Still Life with Old Fart and Fire Tower

Sunday the Thirteenth

Geocaching has long been my exercise of choice. It gives me the opportunity to hike, bike, run, walk, paddle, and hunt cool shit in some of the most intriguing locations I have ever discovered. Sometimes there are car caches, sure, but my favorite hides are the ones that take me places, mostly in the woods, where I can combine the joy of the hunt with a rigorous workout. Lately, I haven’t had enough of these, but this weekend made up for some of that deficiency.

Yesterday, on my return to Greensboro from Martinsville, I detoured over to the Knight Brown Preserve, near Belews Lake, to hunt a relatively new cache, located at the farthest northern reaches of the trail system. The terrain here is moderately rugged, with significant ups and downs as well as rocky, root-laced, natural surface trails. The preserve lies a fair distance out in the sticks, but during the pandemic, people have been flocking to trails, however remote, to get that much-needed exercise. Not unexpectedly, I encountered quite a few vehicles parked at the trailhead, and a good many folks on the trails themselves. Happily, the cache took me far enough out to avoid most of the population.

Back home, Ms. B. and I set to work on the kitchen, scraping off the popcorn ceiling, removing light fixtures, and patching and sanding walls. Things are coming together, but there is still a ton of work to be done for the full renovation. That was far from as much fun as geocaching, but there was, in fact, yet more workout involved, so I ended the day pretty well exhausted.

Told Scott to look unpleasant, so he did.

This morning, I met friend Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott) — the only other member of the Socially Distant No-Dead-Weight Irregulars available today — at the Cane Creek Mountains Natural Area, a short distance south of Burlington. We had hunted a crop of new caches there a few weeks ago, but a handful of new ones had popped up a short time back, as well as at nearby Saxapahaw. We made those our targets for today. As with the Knight Brown Preserve, we encountered a good number of hikers on the trail, but we ended up far enough off the trails to hunt the geocaches in solitude. Happily, our hunts were successful. The trails here take you up and down many steep, rock-strewn hillsides, and after finding the last of our targets, we opted to forego the trail and bushwhack down one the steepest of the steep inclines. It cut off some distance, to be sure, but increased our cardio exercise three-fold, I would wager.

After Cane Creek, we set a course for Saxapahaw and a couple of new caches along the Haw River. The hikes here were short and easy, but the locations were scenic. The first one in particular, which led us to a Boy Scout camp along the river, bore an agreeable Camp Crystal Lake-ish atmosphere. We never did see Jason Voorhees (or his mum), but I think I made Scott nervous during our outing there, so my work was done.

A nice view of Saxapahaw Dam from the trail

After finding both the caches along the trail, we made our way to the Saxapahaw General Store, which — fortunately — wasn’t very crowded and offered decently spaced outdoor seating. So, we opted to grab lunch here, which, as is generally the case, turned out to be mighty satisfying. By the time we left, the crowd was getting larger, so our timing proved propitious.

 

The weather was all too summery for December, but at least the day turned out right pretty after some rain last night. Here’s hoping next weekend will offer another good cardio/caching opportunity.

Adieu.

The Haw River seen from the trail in Saxapahaw

Boy Scout camp near one of the caches. A bit of Camp Crystal Lake atmosphere going on here....

Scott nervously signs the log, fearing some frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.

Yeah, there was something fearsome watching us from the vicinity of the river. I think it was a duck.