It Pays To Pay Attention

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.