Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Feb 27, 2008

New Hogan Reservoir Part 3

Filed in Blog, RVing

This is part of a series.
[Part 1] [Part 2]

Part Three, in which we go geocaching

05 February 2008

Before we left, I’d wandered through the Geocaching website to find out if there were any caches nearby. I wrote down a few coordinates, and plugged them into my GPS unit. It turned out that there was one maybe a quarter of a mile away, so on Tuesday morning we set out to find some.

Our route took us to a half-baked trail–it wasn’t clear whether it was a deer trail or just made by many feet, but it seemed to go the right way. We had gorgeous views of the lake as we went through the woods and the little arrows we were following seemed to move with the twist of the path. It was a shortcut to the main road that we’d had such trouble finding before, and the route seemed to take us up a broad gravel road past utility stations.

And then it veered inwards, towards a rocky, grass-covered knoll.

And there it was: our first ever Geocache. We pulled out the plastic container, covered in khaki-colored tape, and examined its contents: mathoms, and a logbook.

I’d completely forgotten to bring mathoms–you’re supposed to take something and leave something behind. I didn’t even have Markeroni bookmarks! So I didn’t take anything, but we oohed and ahhed over the treasure and signed the logbook.

Since the owner of that cache had set two others in the region, and the next one was not much further, we set out again. This one proved more tricky as the path seemed to lead us on a rather squelchy track above a government duck pond. We picked our way through it and came to the general are where the cache was supposed to be.

As a newbie I’d been completely unashamed to print out the clues that cache creators often leave, and knew that I was looking for something underneath a rock. There were many rocks in the area and one of the disadvantages of such games is that the coordinates as set by one person are not necessarily as found by the next. In other words, the range of accuracy can vary from between a couple of feet to fifty, and you find yourself casting through an area wondering where the heck it could be.

This is also why I’d never before found a geocache, and am very leery of looking for tiny micro caches that come in Altoids tins or film canisters.

But eventually I found it, a cache much like the other with wonderful treasures to admire and a little logbook to sign.

We considered going for the third in the series but, knowing that it was smaller and feeling that we’d done quite enough walking for one day, we decided not to and went back to the campground, where we upped roots and headed off up the road instead.

Part Four will be published tomorrow.