I made a stop near a cache today to do a little geocaching. The cache was out in the woods. I grabbed my gear and started hiking. I followed the gps to the coordinates and starting looking around.
The gps said that I was right on top of it, but I couldn't find any sign of the thing. I knew from the listing that I was searching for an ammo can, and they aren't exactly small, but after poking around just about everywhere that could possibly hide one I was coming up empty.
So I just kind of stood there for a minute looking things over, looking for anything that stood out as a little odd. As I was looking at this log, a fallen tree, I noticed that the last three feet or so looked different. I took a closer look and realized that it was a completely different kind of wood. A totally different species of tree. Well that was certainly odd so I started poking around that section of the log.
Finally I decided to just roll it over. As I had suspected it wasn't really part of the original log at all but had been placed there so as to look like part of the log. In the underside of that section of log someone had carved out a large hollow and the ammo can was held inside of it with two wooden pegs. Very clever!
I felt really good about finding that one as it wasn't an easy find. I signed the log and looked through the swag (trinkets and stuff for trade). There was all sorts of stuff inside from a pair of sunglasses to costume jewelry to a novelty ink pen. I found an American flag patch that I thought might look good sewn to my caching vest so I took it. Then I realized that I hadn't brought any swag of my own to leave. Rats!
I thought for a minute and fished around in my pockets, all 25 of them, and came up with something. I had a very nice, high quality cigar punch on my keychain. As I recall I paid around $30 for it a year or so ago. What the hell, I quit smoking anyway, so I removed it from my keychain and left it in trade for the patch.
I replaced the ammo box in it's hiding place, rolled the log back into place and replaced the leaves and debris that gave it the illusion of being part of the original log. I then did what I could to sweep the ground leaves around enough to not make it too obvious that someone had spent some time in that spot, and retreated out of the woods.
At the edge of the woods I was again reminded that I need to pick up some bug repellent. As I had been wearing shorts I stopped to check the scratches on my legs from all the briars and found three ticks trying to make a buffet out of me. I removed them and returned them to the wild to go bother someone or something else, and returned to my truck to swab a bit of alcohol on the scratches. No point in getting an infection. Stung like hell though.
I have to say it was a very fun little adventure in the woods. I even startled a deer out of it's daytime nesting spot as I made my way towards the cache. I'm sure it really appreciated having it's nap interrupted. It had a great spot though, under some heavy brush and completely surrounded by briars. It's own little fortress.
I've been enjoying the geocaching so much I decided to go ahead and upgrade my geocaching.com membership from a free basic account to a premium paid account ($30/year). There are a few extras that one gets with that but not so much as to really be important. I just felt that if I am getting this much fun out of it the least I can do is to help support them to keep the website and the Groundspeak organization running. There are some caches that one can only access the location info on if they are a paid member, but most of them aren't going to be in places I can get at in my truck, but that's ok too.
When I receive the geocaching.com patch I'll be sewing it onto my vest. I already have the spot picked out.