This year is the 10th anniver­sary of geo­caching and as a way of celebrating:

The geo­caching com­mu­nity is attempt­ing to break the record for num­ber of accounts that logged caches in a sin­gle day. Cur­rently that num­ber stands at 56,654. Even one log on 10–10-10 counts since we are tal­ly­ing how many accounts log a cache, rather than the num­ber of caches logged.

There were gobs of events around the world and prob­a­bly one or two locally to help get folks out caching and log­ging. Donna and I planned to do a lit­tle caching today, in the man­ner in which we usu­ally cache, by our­selves. But after yesterday’s trip we decided to scratch our grandiose plans of find­ing 10 caches on 10/10/10 and fig­ured we would just go get one. We had no clue which one, but wanted some­thing close by.

Last night as I sat in front of the PC log­ging yesterday’s geo­caching adven­tures an email alert came in of a new cache. I opened it up expect­ing to that it was 18 or 19miles away in Augusta, it wasn’t, it was .5 miles away. After briefly toy­ing with the idea of try­ing to be the First To Find, we opted to use this cache as our 1 for ten-ten-ten.

We slept in a lit­tle this morn­ing and had pan­cakes for break­fast. I checked the cache and sure enough, a cou­ple of folks claimed the first to find last night at 9:20,so we grabbed the GPS on our way out to do some gro­cery shop­ping, think­ing that we would get the Kiss­ing Your Sis­ter prize of Sec­ond To Find. We arrived at ground zero and started to search around. I had left the PDA at home so we had no idea what size con­tainer we were look­ing for, nor any clues if avail­able. So we only gave a half-hearted 5 minute hunt before leav­ing empty handed.

Well, the record attempt require­ments didn’t say any­thing about finds, just logs, so a DNF was just as good.

Tal­lu­lah Gorge State Park Sus­pen­sion Bridge

It’s another day, so here’s the story:

When we arrived at Tal­lu­lah State Park I selected the cache on the GPSr and on the PDA (right here is where the pay­ing atten­tion part was needed.) I read the descrip­tion on the PDA and it said the cache was acces­si­ble from the North Rim Trail and was an easy .25 mile hike. We decided to head to the oppo­site end of the trail first to view the gorge from Inspi­ra­tion Point and then work our way back­ward stop­ping at each over­look to oooh and aaah before mak­ing the find. The place was full of peo­ple being as it was Sun­day and the leaves are chang­ing, so we were wor­ried about find­ing the cache with all these mug­gles about, but were con­fi­dent we would find it, because after all it was an ammo can, how could we miss.

We stopped at a cou­ple places and I took a few pic­tures, I’m sure a pho­tog­ra­pher from National Geo­graphic could accu­rately cap­ture the mag­ni­tude of the gorge, but I couldn’t really get it. As we walked along the trail towards over­looks 3 and above the GPSr started point­ing to the left directly into the gorge. It was only read­ing a hun­dred and some­thing feet so it wasn’t telling me the cache was in the mid­dle of the gorge, but it was right off this north rim trail. The only way we could go that direc­tion was to head down towards the sus­pen­sion bridge that con­nects the north rim to the south rim. At the spot where the “trail” turns to go down the gorge there is a sign stat­ing that only the phys­i­cally fit should pass this point and if you go down the 1,099 steps to the bridge, remem­ber that you have to come back up them to go home. I say trail, but it is really noth­ing more than metal treaded stairs with a half dozen short wooden land­ings enclosed by a four foot high rail­ing on both sides to keep you from wandering.

Arriv­ing at the level of the bridge the GPSr was read­ing 70′ and point­ing towards the end of the bridge. We won­dered where you could hide an ammo can there. As we got closer the “trail” split and one way led under the bridge. Ah Ha! It was a small land­ing giv­ing you a view of the under­side of the bridge. You really can’t get off of the “trail”, so the only place the cache could have been was right under the bridge near where the beams were anchored into the rock or under­neath the bench. There wasn’t an ammo can in either spot. I looked at the GPSr and it was now point­ing 75′ across the gorge, maybe it is on the other side after all. When we reached the other side, the GPSr was now point­ing back towards the side we just came from, 135′ away. The tree cover and being 800 feet down in a canyon was wreak­ing havoc with satel­lite recep­tion. We walked back over to the north side thor­oughly dis­gusted. Donna read some of the past logs and no one was com­plain­ing about how hard it was to find. When she read one that said, “Clever hide,” we rethought our search para­me­ters, maybe the ammo can was tied to a rope and dan­gling from the walk­way some where. We looked all along both sides of the “trail” and found no sign of rope, string or chains. Time to give up.

All the while we climbed those 1,099 steps we were think­ing to our­selves (mainly because we didn’t have the breath to waste on the uphill slog) that they surely didn’t expect any­one to climb over the rail­ings to search for the cache and where did they come off with that .25 mile easy hike thing.

An hour or so later when we ran into some other cachers at Tuga­loo State park and they told us the peo­ple they know who have found the Tal­lu­lah Gorge cache described it as being easy and right off the trail, just as the descrip­tion out­lined. An idea started to form in my pea sized brain. When we got back to the car after find­ing this cache I had the eureka moment about that ear­lier State Park miss — I had the wrong cache loaded into the GPSr while read­ing the cor­rect descrip­tion on the PDA.

Because we not only had the State Park caches loaded, but also 40 or so along our intended route, I had inad­ver­tently picked up the coor­di­nates for an Earth Cache that was in the park, not the cache that was part of the Geo-Challenge. Doh! (insert sound of Homer Simp­son style head slap here.) Because I didn’t read the require­ments for the earth cache while we were on site we didn’t have the required knowl­edge to “find” that one either, thereby chalk­ing up two DNFs simultaneously.*

* I didn’t log them as DNFs on gecaching.com though because I had the coor­di­nates loaded of some­thing that didn’t have a actual con­tainer not to find, so how could I have not found it.

Nature Trail in Boyd Pond Park

After count­less miles and count­less hours of criss­cross­ing the state of South Car­olina find­ing a geo­cache in each and every county we took a short 1/2 mile hike in Boyd Pond Park, which is less than 7 miles from home, to grab the Challenge’s bonus cache. We also found 4 oth­ers and DNF’d one while we were out & about.

You know, if we were smart, we would start seri­ously work­ing on the Geor­gia DeLorme Chal­lenge (we have 14 of 60 already) and Geor­gia County Chal­lenge (16 of 159) as we do the 42 state parks…