Hiking

We went for a hike in Hitchcock Woods this evening and checked on two of our caches and scouted a spot for our next hide, Hats Off to Caching in SC. It is inspired by the fellow who was also responsible for my Geocaching License, Renzo Tobias.

It is going to be a mystery cache and we found the perfect place to put it, a place in the Woods that is called Mystery Field. It is more of a thinned out piece of woods than an actual field and it doesn’t have a sign, but it is a spot of the woods that is little used and all up hill on the way out, so heading back to the start is a pleasant walk down. If someone wanted to get this one and the other two we checked on tonight it will be a nice little 3 mile loop.

About 4:30 this afternoon we looked at each other and said, “Let’s go.” We loaded up the Miata with knapsacks, walking sticks, hiking boots, some ice water, a cut up apple and headed into Hitchcock Woods to find “SECTION”. I had pretty much given up on finding this one, we had the Stage 1 coordinates, but in three attempts could not locate the small cache with the coords for Stage 2. A fellow cacher who was one of the half dozen or so to have found this one had offered a hint after our second try, but I was reluctant. Call it a function of the gene that makes us males incapable of asking for directions, I didn’t want the hint, but Donna with Marisa Tomei’s help convinced me to take it.

Mona Lisa Vito: So what’s your problem?
Vincent Gambini: My problem is, I wanted to win my first case without any help from anybody.
Mona Lisa Vito: Well, I guess that plan’s moot.
Vinny Gambini: Yeah.
Mona Lisa Vito: You know, this could be a sign of things to come. You win all your cases, but with somebody else’s help, right? you win case after case, and then afterwards you have to go up to somebody and you have to say, “thank you.”
[pause]
Mona Lisa Vito: Oh my God, what a f**king nightmare!

With the hint we found the Stage 1 container within minutes of arriving at GZ. The coordinates for Stage 2 were loaded up and off we went. A few minutes into the trip a big rustling sound came off from our right. We had spooked a deer. She circled through the woods a bit and came back out on the trail 25 yards ahead of us, eyeballed us for a minute or so, then danced away. When we started it said the cache was .25 miles away right straight down the Palmetto Ride trail where the Stage 1 was hidden off of. The distance steadily decreased to about half that before the trail headed off in a perpendicular direction. The distance to the cache grew and grew until it was over a third of mile off, before the trail turned back and the distance started to came down again. When it got down to around 300 feet the trail again turned 90 degrees away from the cache.

Knowing the trail eventually looped back again, but not for a long while, when went off-trail and made a beeline for our goal (well, as much a beeline as possible through the thick brush and brambles, dang, the scratches from last weekend’s bushwhacking expedition were just starting to disappear.) The GPSr led us straight to a small dam that we had been to long before when we were just hiking in here and not looking for ammo cans well integrated into the environment. To the left was an algae covered pond, to the right was a 30 foot drop and the direction indicator said 60′ straight across the two foot wide concrete dam. Neither of us were foolhardy enough to try the balancing act, so we weighed the steep wooded drop to the small stream below the dam or the long trail to the other side.

The long walk won out because we knew that was easier to get to the dam from the Low Country Ride trail from previous experience. When we got around to the other side of the dam the GPSr did it again, pointed straight across the dam the other way and read sixty feet. Niiice, now what?

We fight the only slightly less steep downhill on this side through thick underbrush to the very bottom of the ravine about 90′ downstream from the dam. The GPSr was now pointing right at the dam. Damn. We daintily hop a very murky looking stream and fight more thick vines with thorny sides until we are at the base of the dam. There inside the three foot square opening of a water gate was an ammo can. FOUND IT! (For some reason it was totally unnecessarily hidden behind a couple pieces of broken clay pipe, like there would ever be any foot traffic down here and they might accidentally spot it…)

We signed the log, climbed the hill back to the trail and headed out of the woods. Total miles walked, 3.0; total time spent in the woods, 1:55:30; average speed, 2 mph; total bleeding scratches on my legs and arms, 5.

Sure hope they never have to open that overflow gate, they’ll no one will ever see that ammo can again.

Oh, and OddAngles, “Thank you.”

Walked by this pond on our way into Hitchcock Woods yesterday.

The two caches we hid yesterday were published (listed on geocaching.com and announcing emails sent out) a little before 9:00 PM last night and in less than 12 hours both were found.

I checked the site at mid day and “Out West” was logged with a FTF at 7:50 this morning. The same cacher logged “Jump At Your Own Risk” as a second to find, some one had beat them to it, and they wondered aloud in their log how they could have possibly missed each other.

The answer came this evening when the FTF of “Jump” logged in. They went out hunting as soon as they got the email last night. Now technically you are not supposed to be in the woods after dark, but that is not what was so wrong about this person caching at 10 o’clock at night, it was the fact that at that time Aiken was in the middle of a big ol’ thunderstorm. To quote from his log: “with the lightning flashing so much it was like hiking with a strobelight on!”

Such is the lure of being the First To Find a cache for some people.