About 7 years ago, a 3 mile section of old US 301 in South Carolina near the Georgia border was turned into a walking trail. When we found some geocaches on the 1-1/2 stretch from the Savannah River back towards the middle we noticed that there were none on the other mile and a half. So over the next few months we placed 8 of our own on that first section.
Back in 2011 we were geocaching fools, it was our biggest year where found 332 caches, averaging almost one a day, so the distance, about 50 miles one way, to these caches didn’t seem that bad. Over the intervening years our caching has tapered off. This year we have found all of 73 and almost all of those were on our big trip out west in May. Last year we found zero, didn’t even try.
So now, that hundred mile round trip seems awfully long to do any maintenance and while there hasn’t been too much to do, it is still not a lot of fun to make the trip. We decided to just go ahead and archive the caches and on Sunday made the trip down to collect the containers. They were all fairly easy to find except for one camoed matchstick container. We were pretty sure we knew where to look, the hint said, “under log”, but there was nothing under the obvious one.
We brought everything home and salvaged what contents were worth it. We also weeded out which containers were worth saving as well. The plastic lock-n-lock was broken, so into the trash they went. The gasket was shot on the bison tube, so it went there too. The green penlight was an on-the-fly improvised container not really well suited for the job and was no longer usable as either a geocaching container or a flashlight, so, yup, we threw it away too. The ammo cans and the matchstick holders will get reused in 2019.