More numbers caching?

After my big geocaching day with Ada last week, you'd think I would have had enough of numbers-style caching, that is going on cache runs solely for reaching some number of finds. And I kind of was, but once again got lured into another day of numbers by some geocaching challenges. Way back at the beginning of the year, I did a trail run out in the New Mexico Deserts finding a bunch of challenge caches (see my Why? post). There were 37 challenge caches in all and I barely qualified for any of them, but according to the current geocaching guidelines, you are allowed to sign your name on challenge caches and then count it as a find later once you qualify, so I keep an eye on my statistics and every now and again, I find that I qualify for another one. After Ada and I found 100 caches in a day, I reviewed the list and two other challenges jumped out at me. One was to have at least two calendar days in a month with triple digit finds, noting that they don't need to be in the same year. The other was to have any month with over 150 finds. With the recent 103 day find, I was close to both of these challenges. I was already at 130 finds for the month. And as it happened, my geocaching calendar already had 80 finds on October 28. So all I would need to do was to find 20 caches on the 28th. This is still a lot of caches for me, but seemed like it would allow for Ada, Sasha and I to have a little more fun and relaxation than our last geocaching numbers exploit. I checked the geocaching map to see where there was a good spot to pick up a score of caches, and settled on the town of Kingston. Ample caches to find, some good parks to visit, a handful of earthcaches by the river, sounded like a good day.

So not even a week after our last big day, Ada, Sasha and I headed out for yet another geocaching numbers run, albeit a much smaller one. We dropped Levin off at school, then motored south to Kingston, stopping for a few quick park and grabs in Harriman along the way. Our first destination was Fort Southwest Point park. We didn't go straight there but stopped at a few river side parks along the way picking up easy caches. Ada delighted in trading toys in several of these, and was generally in high spirits. The Fort has some interesting history and cool reconstructed buildings to show what it must have looked like over 200 years ago. We wandered around, found a few geocaches, ate a snack and enjoyed having the place pretty much to ourselves.

Confluence of the Tennessee and Clinch rivers

We had already found over 10 caches and were well on our way to reach our goal as we drove to our second destination, Ladd Landing greenway. Here we found a 2+ mile paved hiking and biking trail with several geocaches alongside it. We didn't encounter another person at all, while walking (Ada road in the backpack this time) along the trail and looking for caches. And the caches here are good ones, mostly large sizes and stuffed with kid toys to trade for. While the scenery wasn't spectacular, it was good exercise and a great way to reach our goal. Numbers caching isn't always tedious, we found 26 caches total, visited a few new parks and towns, had a great walk and traded lots of toys.

Confluence of the Clinch and Emory rivers

Nice greenway bridge

Smooshed snake along the greenway

Patience is a virtue: Two new caches published today

I wouldn't be the first geocacher to begin to lose patience with the geocache review process. The topic comes up every few months in geocaching forums, because no one enjoys waiting. Today, my two latest geocaches were published, GC59T9E, Thermodynamics Bull Run Fossil Plant and GC5E2TK, Cross Mountain Day hike. Normally, my geocaches get published pretty quickly, I'd like to think by now I know what I am doing when it comes to geocache placement. But these two got stuck in review for about a month. 

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.

An unimpressive achievement

Today, Ada, Sasha and I set out with one magnificent geocaching goal in mind, to find 100 geocaches in one day. This isn't actually as difficult as it sounds, and within geocaching circles, 100 find days are now very common. The reason for this is the rise in popularity of "power trails". These are series of geocaches, placed about every 530 ft along a road for endless miles. Back in New Mexico, the longest one close to where we lived was 100 caches long and meandered through 10+ miles of barren desert north of I-10 (I think it was recently surpassed by a trail themed along the periodic table of elements). I had attempted this power-trail a couple times before with the kids. But the monotony of it starts to set in after the first dozen or so caches. Each one is an easy find, only a few dozen feet off the road, too small for geocaching trade items, and usually the same generic container. The one outside of Las Cruces that we tried was called the Medal of Honor series (MoH) and the owner of the series, DocGeo*, made each listing unique by pasting in a different story of a Medal Of Honor recipient. The owner was indeed a veteran, and the concept was actually quite nice as a memorial, even if the caching was pretty boring.

The kids and I only ever got through 40 or so of the MoH series at a time, and in fact, I never finished it. Instead, we would break off the power trail and drive miles into the barren desert to find a "real" geocache, one that was big enough to have some toys in it, and involved a bit of a hike. Up until today, my biggest days in geocaching were 69 on 2012-10-28; 37 on 2013-10-26; 26 on 2011-08-03. I've never really been after big numbers, but I ahve a few days where I tried to find quite a few. Most people i knew around Las Cruces though wouldn't be impressed with this, since they had all done the MoH series in a day, and many had done much larger power-trails. In fact, the wild west is a great place for obscenely long power trails and large geoart. Tons of open space public land, remote roads with little to know traffic. There's one power trail in Nevada that includes 2800 caches, and people regularly find several hundred or even thousands of caches in a day. Pretty mind blowing, and for some reason pretty popular among geocachers as well.

Once upon time, getting 100 finds in a day was something you really had to work at. Before power trails, one would have to carefully plan a route to hit several major metropolitan areas, would have a huge variety of terrains to deal with, muggles to avoid, and content with DNFs, missing caches, and gross locations. It must have taken all day, and hundreds of miles of driving, and it is no wonder people were impressed by the accomplishment. Then power-trails came along and the achievement was diminished. Now someone could feasibly find 100 caches in 4 hours on their own. Thus the power trails grew longer and longer to maintain a sense of accomplishment. And the longer they got, the more people found ways to make them easier to do. Doing a power-trail in a team can greatly speed it up, with one person driving and the passenger quickly jumping out and signing the log. Due to the size of the trails, owners no longer could feasibly maintain them, and thus they encouraged finders to perform maintenance when it appeared necessary. Not only was replacing log sheets encouraged, but throwing down a whole new container was encouraged. It wasn't long before other absurd practices started, such as the 3-cache-monty and leap-frogging. Despite the fact that running power-trails is extremely tedious, a waste of gas, hard on your vehicle with all the stops and starts, sometimes fairly dangerous since you spend a ton of time on the side of highways, and a large portion for the caches you find are almost indistinguishable from trash, it still is a pretty popular form of geocaching. A power trail in a  remote area will garner geocacher attention like flies to honey. And it must all boil down to some sense of accomplishment for logging so many finds in such a short span of time.

So let's finally talk about what Ada, Shasha and I did today. Or more appropriately, what I chose to do today and drag Ada and Sasha along with me. I have already established how this kind of geocaching is not my favorite, and that I find many of the practices used on power trails utterly ridiculous. And yet, my goal for the day was to reach 100 cache finds, and the way I was going to do so was along a power trail. Why? Well, the main reason is the most simple, to see if we can. Finding 100 geocaches with a 2-year old and dog along for the ride would be challenging for me. Not only would I have little or no help in finding any of the caches, or doing any of the driving, but the demands of Ada and Sasha would mean that I wouldn't even be able to concentrate on caching while we were out. The other aspect that appealed to me was to constrain myself to finding 100 caches between dropping my son off at school at 7:20 am, and picking him up at 2:40 pm. A decent sized window, but it would be challenging for us. On top of those reasons, finding 100 caches in a day would qualify me for a couple local challenges, and I enjoy knocking those out when I can. And finally, it just seemed like an agreeable way to spend a day with my daughter, instead of puttering around the house as we often do. I planned on attempting the first 96 geocaches of the LMK power trail which starts near Caryville and goes west along highway 63 to Huntsville, TN. The LMK power trail actually encompasses 350 geocaches, and goes all the way to Oneida, TN, and also stretches to the Cumberland Gap to the east, but I knew that was well beyond what we would be capable of. My goal was to get us to Huntsville, where there is a nice waterfall and park along the New River. The LMK power trail also does not make an effort to be something more than a power-trail (like the MOH does). It unabashedly states that it is a numbers run, and after you read the first listing, there isn't much point in looking at any of the others. Although it does one thing that's kind of cute, having each cache name have one word, so that when you combine all the series together you get a limerick. perhaps that is why it is called the LMK series? I can't blame them though, 350 caches is a lot.

This post is already growing too long, I wish I had taken some pictures to break up all the text. Alas, I forgot the camera today. And pictures really wouldn't have captured what it was like to find 100 caches in a day, although perhaps a video could have demonstrated the repetitiveness of it all. i would drive 600-1000 ft at a time, then pull over as best I could near each geocache. Then, I'd carefully check my mirrors before jumping out and running around the car over to where the cache. Most of the time the cache would be easy to find, and generally the caches were in decent shape. There were however a few times where I couldn't find the cache, or when found they had fallen on the ground or their containers were cracked and falling apart. Unlike others who power-cache, I didn't bring replacement logs or containers, I just took my DNFs as they came and tried to keep notes on which caches were in bad shape. Some general stats:

• 3 caches were full of water
• An additional 8 caches had SAD logsheets (Soggy And Destroyed)
• 3 caches were found on the ground obviously dislodged from where they were supposed to be in guardrails.
• I had 7 DNFs on the power trail, some locations showed sings that signs had recently been hit by cars, others I just didn't see any sign of a cache. On one, the top of a bison was still attached to a sign-post, but the bottom with the log was nowhere to be found.
• I skipped 12 caches while driving west, due to them being on the wrong side of the road, and at one point because a Prison crew was doing roadside cleanup. I found 11 of these on my return trip.

My notebook to keep track of the finds

I managed to find 78 of the 96 caches along the power trail by the time we reached Huntsville. Ada had already gone through one movie on the kindle, some games, and the Of Monsters and Men album by this point. We had a nice respite from the geocaching bonanza in Huntsville, which is a cute little town. We pulled into a park beside a waterfall and ate lunch (and got a DNF for the cache there), then drove down a gravel road to a nature area and hiked up to an Indian cave. This break from the power-trail was good for all of us, with Sasha tearing all around the woods and me huffing and puffing to carry Ada up a steep hill. It was a beautiful fall day, with crunchy leaves underfoot, and ample sunshine streaming down. 

With two additional non-power-trail finds in Huntsville, I had 20 more caches to find to reach my goal. I could have pressed on towards Oneida, where the LMK trail continues for another 40 or so caches, but I decide to take my chances heading back, since I was a little concerned about picking up my son in time. On the way back east Ada napped and I found 11 of the 12 we had skipped on our way out. That left 9 more caches to go. I picked up 5 between Caryville and La Follete, luckily easy hides along strip malls off of highway 63/9/25W. We then drove back to Clinton, where we had enough time to grab 5 more caches near the interstate. Phew, 100 caches down! An unimpressive achievement! No geocaching records were broken, we averaged 14.3 caches per hour, or one cache every 4.2 minutes. It's little more than a milestone for my geocaching stats, but all in all it wasn't a bad day either. The fall colors along highway 63 made for a cheery background to our drive. And now I feel like I know the area a little better. Would I try for 100 caches in a day (or more) again? Not likely... until someone puts out a "Find 200 caches in a day" Challenge. I dread the day.

A sad day for my geocaching activities

Not too long ago, I fell into possession of a Nexus 7 tablet. While kind of nifty, I never really considered getting a tablet for myself, seeing it as an unnecessary toy. However, I quickly found out that it made geocaching a whole lot easier, I even posted about it. It is super handy for navigation, having a bigger screen and maps than my Garmin GPSmaps 60Csx,a nd I can have thousands of geocaches loaded into it all the time, rather than just hundreds for a locality on my GPSr. Plus I could access geocache hints, descriptions, logs, all the perks of a paperless caching device which my Garmin isn't. It has been my caching companion ever since. But alas, all good things must come to an end. Just the other day, it fell out of my arms while carrying it around the house and the screen cracked. At first I didn't notice it had cracked, and frankly I had dropped it several times before. The silver bezel had chipped away in one corner and I had recently JB-welded a fix to it. So without looking, I tucked it back under my arm and off we went for a day hiking in the Obed. It wasn't util I pulled it out to help navigate us to our destination that I discovered something was wrong. I couldn't unlock the screen. Then on closer inspection I could see the cracks. Now if it was just cracked glass, but the screen still worked, that would be acceptable. But it appears the digitizer behind the glass also is malfunctioning, with some regions not responding, and others overly responding. So now I ahve a pretty much useless slab of electronics. All of a sudden, I am having to go back to caching the way I used to in New Mexico, and it just feels hard. Did I really put up with not having geocche information while out hiking? How did I know which geocaches were ones to target in a sea of crappy geocaches? Fixing the Nexus 7 will cost around $80, and I am considering it. But a brand new tablet can be had for as little as $150, would it be smarter for me to go for something newer? And then, our budget situation is not one that permits frivolous spending, maybe I should just get used to the old way of geocaching. Blasted butterfingers!

Trail Running Haw Ridge Park

We had a lazy weekend, no big trips, not much on the agenda, the kids mostly just wanted to play outside with the neighbors. In other words, a perfect time for me to find a little time to go for a longish trail run. I have been wanting to run the trails at Haw Ridge for a while. Over the summer, the kids and I did a little hike in the park, but we only scratched the suface. It is one of the areas largest municipal parks and has a great network of trails, so it's really a surprise that I hadn't adventured in there much yet.

This morning was our first frost of the year, with temps dropping into the 30's overnight. So I wore long underwear tops and bottoms and a headband to keep my ears warm. I had loaded up my GPSr with all the parks caches, including a few offset multis. There was still a dense fog as I drove over to the parking area, where I was the first car to arrive. It was cold, and for the first 5 minutes I was having doubts about whether I'd be able to do the run I had in mind. Foolish thoughts, I was soon plenty warm, pumping my legs up hilly trails and to my first cache find. There was a small herd of 8 or so deer near the cache, and I watched them prance away down the slope before walking to GZ and finding a nice old ammo can. The caches in this park are all ammo cans, and they are all old by geocaching standards, having been placed in 2002. This is actually a pretty neat thing, to have so many old caches in one place, and all in good shape, at least in my experience. I often feelt that this is the what geocaching used to be about, finding treasures out in the woods. Geocaching has morphed into something much much more it seems, with so many roadside finds, and containers that have little to nothing in them. And a lot of the older caches have been stolen, or downgraded over the years.

As I continued running (and walking up some of the steeper hills), I got happier and happier. The fall colors were just coming in, and a nice blanket of fallen leaves crunched underfoot as I trotted along the paths. The trails were not designed tog et you places, but more to get you moving, so they twisted and double-backed, sometimes almost looping back to where they started. They hugged the shoreline, where 8 inch fish were deadly still inches beneath the glassy surface. The sun was starting to warm the air, and eventually my misty breath disappeared and I continued thumping down the trails. By the end of my run, I had found all the remaining caches in the park I hadn't previously found, and logged 7 miles. Silly, but I wonder if not having more caches to find in the park will make me less inclined to revisit it? There are a lot more trails to explore, and many more nice runs. I would be a fool not to come back for another jog