For the Cross Mountain Cache, the delay can be attributed to the confusing new geocaching policy by Tennessee State Parks. The Cumberland Trail (CT) is considered a State Park, even though State Parks doesn't own/manage much of the property that it is on. During a recent geocaching event at Cove Lake, State Park officials and rangers met with geocachers to talk about the new geocaching policy and I asked them about how they would handle the CT since it has somewhat different property issues than other state parks. The answer then was that geocaches would still follow the State Park permit system. So when placing this cache, I had that in mind and once everything was ready, I contacted the CT Ranger Office and asked about getting a permit. I think I may be the first geocacher in the northern part of the state to ask about this, because they didn't quite know if I needed a permit or not, but immediately forwarded me to a Ranger for the southern part of the trail. This didn't end up going very far, since the ranger down there wasn't really aware of property rights for the northern portion, and was generally confused as to why he would be answering my permit question. I tried again with the CT Office and on my next attempt, got a little further. The ranger I was speaking with asked other rangers in the office about the Cross Mountain section of the trail, and they concluded that this portion was on TWRA property, and that the CT use agreement wouldn't allow them to issue permits for geocaches. But as long as TWRA is ok with the geocache placement, than they saw no issue. I called up TWRA and immediately got a run-around, with the representative there telling me that if it was ok with TN State Parks, then it was fine by them. Argh! Someone please just take responsibility for this!
Eventually, I got the TWRA folks to admit that they are ok with geocaches on their property as long as their public use rules are followed (like wearing blaze orange during hunting season), and I called the CT Office again just to double check that they didn't want to give me a permit for this placement. once they heard that I had talked to TWRA and gotten their ok, the CT Rangers told me to just go for it, and that no permit would be needed. Great! I submitted the cache for review and figured I had this thing in the bag.
...Until the geocaching reviewer rejected the cache stating the TN State Parks Policy and my need for a permit. Man I wish they had been in on my conversations with the park rangers. I replied to the Reviewer with a note of my own laying out the whole story of how the CT Rangers had told me I didn't need a permit. A week later, the Reviewer responded to me asking for the name and contact info for the Ranger, which for some dumb reason I hadn't thought to get. So I contacted the CT Office again, but the Ranger I spoke to wanted to make sure the head ranger was on board with this, and it turned out to take a few days just to get in touch with the head ranger (high level admins are harder to reach usually). I did finally get in touch with him, and not only did he stand by what the other rangers had told me, about not needing a permit for the Cross Mountain section of the CT, but he gave me a bit more information about the CT use agreements. Apparently, the Cross Mountain section use agreement is limited to a 32" (that's inches!) swath through TWRA. So as long as my cache wasn't directly on the trail (it's not) the CT office does not even consider it in their domain. The tricky part is that other sections of the CT within TWRA (or elsewhere) have different use agreements, that could be as much as 500' on either side of the trail. I don't know if these use agreements are available for the public to review (they probably area), but it sure would have been useful to know this before hand. In the end, I was able to give the geocaching Reviewer the Head Rangers contact info, and voila, today the cache is published! Phew... it only took a month of back and forth, with lots of waiting in between.
The story for the other cache has similar issues, but I won't go into them for fear that they might give away clues about the final location. For that cache, I had hidden the container way back in the end of July, but hadn't actually put together the puzzle until a few months later. In fact, I'm still worried that the puzzle may give me some more grief, since I haven't had anyone verify the thermodynamics calculations. Right now, I'm just crossing my fingers, and hoping that my own double-checking was enough to have good numbers. We'll see what the first solvers think.
And now starts a new kind of waiting, to see who, if anyone, will go after these caches. Time to be virtuous.
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