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.