Visiting a friends house... sort of

Today after my doctor's appointment in Powell I took Ada on a little side trip. We went to visit my friend's house. Too bad he wasn't home.

Well, probably no one understood that. But this is actually pretty cool. Back in Las Cruces, one of my geocaching friends was Victor Gibbs, aka The Marauders. When we moved to Knoxville he told me that I would have to go pay a visit to his family homestead. There is even a geocache there. Well, the months passed by but the Gibbs homestead isn't all that close to where we live, and we don't tend to travel by it very often, or at all. The one time I passed near it last summer was when I hiked House Mountain, and after that hike I had forgotten that I was close to the historic house. So after today's doctor's appointment in Powell, TN, Ada and I made a long side trip out to the site. It is very nicely preserved/restored (I'm not sure which), and if it were in a major park it would get loads of attention I'm sure. But it is located in a very unassuming area, surrounded by modest suburban homes, on a rather unremarkable stretch of country highway. If it weren't for the geocache that I was navigating to, I could have driven right past it.

So there you go Victor. I visited the family site. Dropped off a TB, and snapped a bunch of amateurish photos for you. I hope you enjoy.

Haw Ridge Bummer

Pretty quickly after I adopted the Hawridge user account, I got in touch with the local reviewers about unarchiving some of the caches that are still there. I received an unequivocal "no". So that left me with the options of relisting the caches, or removing/changing them altogether. After consulting with a few of the locals from the TVG (Tennessee Valley Geocachers), it sounded like most people thought that relisting the caches would be worthwhile, since it kind of preserves some of the caching history of the park. Today I decided to take my run in the park, and I brought along extra logbooks, swag and ziplocs to spruce up some of the old archived caches so that they would be ready to relist. What a surprise it was when I couldn't find the first one, Sunken Treasure. I had just found it two weeks ago, and someone else had found it last week, but now it was missing? What a bummer. The same thing happened when I got to Big Bin. I'll probably never know how these disappeared, but I feel somewhat responsible. I really doubt that a non geocacher would have taken them, they've been unmolested for over 3 years while not listed in geocaching.com. It's much more likely that a geocacher was alerted to their presence from the recent finds, or even my blog. My recent attention to these caches may have led someone to come up with their own decision about what should be done with the containers, and voila, now they are gone. While I am a little bummed about this, it's not really a big deal. They were archived caches after all, forgotten by all, and pretty much geo-trash. If a cacher can turn them into something else cool, that is certainly a legitimate way of giving them new life. Still, I would have liked to relist them with links to the archived caches so people could peruse the history of the cache if interested. I did end up doing this with Troll Hole , and it got published within hours of me submitting it. Maybe I can still do this with another of the archived caches in the park.

Father Son Caching Day

SOME MILD SPOILERS BELOW, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Lately I've been doing most of my geocaching with my daughter or on my own. When on my own I go after hikes that the kids/family would not enjoy, but I absolutely love. Caching with my daughter happens because I'm a stay at home dad right now and am with her every day. My son though, has recently become envious of his little sister. I will pick him up from school and Ada will show off on of her new toys she traded from a geocache, and Levin asks, "did you get anything for me?". Sometimes I we do, but usually, not, and he is left feeling grumpy that he doesn't get a new toy. So to make up for this, we decided to to a father-son caching day, just the two of us, searching out caches in Knox county.

I used to cache with Levin quite a bit, especially before Ada was born. We'd go on long caching hikes, drives around the desert, and we scored so many toy cars that we have a bin full of them now. Toy cars are still one of his favorites but he is also interested in other stuff that can be typically found in geocaches. Today our plan was to cache our way from Oak Ridge, through the town of Karns and then down south to a geocaching event in Farragut I call it Farragut, but is really just a giant zone of strip malls and big box stores surrounding Interstate 40. I'm not even sure where the real town of Farragut lies. The challenge would be to find regular sized caches, there are not that many of them i this area. But there are enough that I thought we'd have a good time.

Our first stop was at Melton Hill Vista, which was actually just an evil micro, but I thought it would be fun since it involved some rock scrambling up to a nice viewpoint. Sure enough, Levin enjoyed the scramble up and down, and helped find the cache in no time. On the way down, he decide he was an orangutan and brachiated his way down the steep treacherous slope. So far so good.

Levin shows off the evil cache hide

That's cactus! In tennessee! Who would've thought?

Our next group of caches was at the Knox County Sportpark, where there is a nice 3-cache tribute to one of the local geocachers. I mistakenly thought that all three of these were regular sized caches, but it turned out that the final was a micro. Oops. Levin did get a trade item in the first cache though. Unfortunately, the cold started to get to him while walking on the soggy fields between these caches, and his enthusiasm for finding was diminished. I really enjoyed these caches because they incorporated a really nice puzzle. I had seen something similar before, but there was an extra twist on one of them that was new to me. I really appreciate a nice field puzzle.

A nicely done field puzzle, right up my alley

Walking on soggy fields

We continued driving south and east, picking up a couple P&Gs, and warming up in the car. Our next two regular sized caches were TB Graveyard and The Treasure of Good Sam Saints. These were ideal caches as far as my son was concerned. They were both only a short distance from a parking spot, 100-200ft, had relatively easy to find containers, and were loaded with toys for him to rifle through, and pick out a trade. He traded a fishing bobber for a tiny plastic rat in one, and his spiderman puzzle for a few plastic lizards in the other. He's really into the small plastic animals right now, so I suspect we'll ahve a bucket of them soon. Caches like these are not so common it seems. They require a bit more effort to maintain, and often get muggled or have other problems that make them totally junky. Plus they are under-appreciated by what I see as the main geocaching demographic. Most adult cachers could care less for trading toys, and are more interested in simply adding there name to a log to prove that they indeed found the cache. Because the cache itself has little appeal, it is the process of finding the cache that gets respected. Creative hides and camo, interesting puzzles, worthy destinations. And this makes a ton of sense, kids aren't the main geocaching demographic, why should caches appeal to them? I am as guilty as anyone, of my 47 hides, only one is really geared towards kids. The funny thing is, I cache with my kids all the time, and I lament the fact that there aren't more kids friendly caches. I suppose I should do something about it and hide some more.

Warning near TB Graveyard

There were a couple cool sink-hole/cave things near the TB Graveyard cache.

Levin shows his white rat

Trading puzzle for LIzards

Our final stop was at Fudruckers where we joined a huge group of geocachers for burgers. I used to be really shy about attending events, but now I am starting to really look forward to them. I really get into talking shop about who is hiding what and where, what cool trips people have been on, what interesting caches have been found. There is a really friendly group of cachers around here, for which I feel pretty lucky. The burgers and social made a fine end to our geocaching excursion. Some final stats: 17 finds, 1 attended, 1 DNF, 3 toys traded, 1 TB picked up, 1 happy kid, 1 happy dad. A good day out.

Adopting Haw Ridge

After placing a cache in Haw Ridge, GC5FMH9, I received an interesting log. IN it, the FTF cachers mentioned also finding a nearby archived cache which was still there. Naturally, I was curious so I looked into it. Up until just a few months ago, all of the geocaches in Haw Ridge park were hidden by user HawRidge, who placed a baker's dozen of geocaches in the park in 2002. A couple of these were archived in 2011 and this user mentioned he was going to archive all of them in 2011, but I am guessing that the local geocachers convinced him to just keep them active until they had issues. Once I had found this user, it was pretty easy to go through and see all the archived caches that were in the park and a couple of them looked like they might still be there, so I loaded the coordinates into my GPSr and took a run out in the park.

I stopped by Sunken Treasure first and sure enough, I located a nice big ammo can. The logbook was missing, and it was pretty sparse on contents, but it was in otherwise good shape. Next I stopped at the Troll Hole, which was a muddy hole with a stream running through the bottom of it. Again, the logs were not that damning and I was hoping I would make a find, but I came up empty on this one and I think that it is indeed long gone. Lastly I stopped at Big Bin, which I found despite not doing the offset calculations properly. This cache was a nice big ammo can also in good shape.There are two other archived caches on the south side of the park, but I decided I had a long enough run and would look for those another day.

Finding archived caches is cool and all, but it also felt like a waste to have these nice containers sitting out there not being found. Either they should be unarchived or the containers reclaimed and hidden somewhere else. I guess I could also submit new listings in the exat same place, but having an old listing from 2002 has a coolness factor, at least for me. So I reached out to the geocacher Hawridge, at first through the geocaching.com site. No response. Next I tried posting some notes on the Friends of Haw Ridge facebook page, and also this website. Shortly after I was put in touch with Tom Dunigan, who was Hawridge the geocacher. He mentioned not being active anymore and was willing to adopt out his caches. The only problem was, you can't adopt out archived listings. Sure he could try to unarchive these himself, and then adopt them out, but I could sense he wasn't keen on the effort involved in that. So I offered him a solution, how about give me control of the Hawridge account? By simply giving me the password, I could edit the profile to send emails to me, unarchive listings (hopefully) and perform maintenance on caches. He agreed right away, so i am now the proud owner of the Haw Ridge geocaches. For now, that sounds fine by me. I live close by, and like having excuses to go trail running. The park is awesome for trail running, with a web of trails all over it providing potential for short and long runs. We'll see how things play out. I am hesitant to simply transfer all the listings to my regular player account, since they don't really represent my geocaching hider style. But having to check and log onto two separate accounts has its own shortcomings. It'll be a learning process, seeing what works best for getting notifications and performing maintenance. Already two of the caches have been found, so I'm likely to get a lot more traffic in my mailbox from Haw Ridge caches, than my regular hides. It'll be good for me to see how that feels.

Scouting out locations in Big Ridge State Park

I went for a nice long hike this afternoon, just me and the dog, in Big Ridge State Park. I have already found all the geocaches in this park, there are only a few, but the park has a bunch of trails that I wanted to explore, some with interesting stories and history. We started up the east half of the Ghost House Loop trail, passing the first of what was to be many old cemeteries. Then we took the Big Valley Trail up and over Pinnacle Ridge, and down into Dark Hollow. Next we hiked the Indian Rock Trail, which is a big loop in the Northwest corner of the park. I enjoyed this trail a lot, since it had ridgetop hiking with views of the lake and mountains through the trees (forget about it in summer time). It also had some interesting historical features such as memorial plaques at Indian Rock and Sharp's Station, the 2nd oldest settlement west of the Appalachians. Parts of the trail seemed overgrown by briers though, making me think it doesn't get much traffic. The spur trail to Sharp's station was a nice little stroll, passing a frozen waterfall and campsite before opening up to the location of the old fort.

After completing the loop, we had enough time to explore the eastern half of the Dark Hollow Trail, which was an old county road. This was much easier hiking, but not as scenic, along the bottom of the hollow. The trail ends abruptly before reaching any view of the lake, which seemed funny to me, we continued further along until we could see the lake, but the views of the lake from here were not that great, since it is basically just a narrow inlet. Along this trail I also stumbled across a tent. When I first caught sight of it, I paused to leash the dog, and call out so that I wouldn't surprise any campers/squatters. As I got closer, I saw that it was only a tent and fly hung up in some branches. The tent looks almost new, and couldn't have been out here long, but there were no signs of any poles. I packed it up and carried it out with me anyways, since it would just become unsightly trash if left out there.

For the return trip we took the Big Valley Trail again back over to the junction with the Ghost Loop, but took the other half of the loop. Supposedly there is the ghostly outline of a house here, but I sure didn't notice anything. All in all we tallied almost 10 miles in 5 hours. Not bad at all. And there is a lot of potential for geocache placements out here. I'll ahve to contact the State Rangers to see what I can get permission to do, but I'm thinking about a traditional out by Sharp's Station, a multi that tours the Indian Rock Loop, and a puzzle cache out the east end of Dark Hollow. And I'll have to look into the story behind the Ghost House loop, it could make a really spooky night-cache/Wherigo.

How geocaching sculpted our roadtrip: Part 3 Southbound

Our route from New Hampshire back to Tennessee took down the busy eastern seaboard. Unlike the Northbound leg of our road trip, I had no geocache planning for this part of the trip. I hadn't searched for caches along our route and flagged the best ones worth stopping for, or even downloaded a single pocket query. We simply drove. At our first rest stop, we were in Connecticut which would be a new state for me, so I convinced my wife to let me use her smartphone to look for a nearby cache. Alas, the closest one was on the other side of a divided and busy highway. Still, the rest stop was cool in that there was a Tesla charging station there and a parked Tesla charging up. I've wanted to see a Tesla for a while, so it was cool to see.

We then drove into New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, into dreary and hazardous winter weather. Snow, rain, sleet, slippery roads. No stopping or thinking about geocaching here. Our next rest stop was in West Virginia, and after filling up on gas, I checked for nearby caches again and was excited to see that the closest cache was one by WVTim! I'd heard about this guy and his caches on forums, Youtube videos, and on the Groundspeak blog, where he won Geocacher of the month in March 2013. This guy is kind of a legend in the area, placing popular gadget caches all over his state. I pleaded with the family to check out the one that was nearby, Name that Tune, and they acquiesced. It was on the way back to the interstate anyways, so we pulled over and walked over to the giant birdhouse, tucked behind a large wooden sign so that the road traffic couldn't see you as you messed with the geocache. The giant birdhouse had a pull-out drawer with a kids xylophone in it. Each note was labeled with the appropriate letter, and a number. In order to open the combination lock on a side door, you needed to play a simple tune, "Twinkle Twinkle", during the last phrase of the sing, you noted the sequence of numbers and that yielded to combination. Simple, not too hard, but fun. We traded some small toys, put everything back the way it belongs, and were on our way in no time. How cool to have a cool geocache stop totally unplanned. An hour later we arrived at our destination for the night, my Aunt and Uncle's house in Virginia.

In the morning, we took it easy, having a leisurly breakfast with my Aunt and Uncle. The weather front that had given us the travel woes on the previous day had brought warm temperatures, it was nearly 60 degrees out, so we opted to go for a hike. My uncle let me load the geocaching app on his smartphone, and we hunted for some geocaches at Shrinemount, Orkney Springs. We ended up doing a 2+ mile loop hike, past the outdoor Shrine, and Labrynthe, then up to the top of the hill. The geocaches out ehre are seldom hunted, and a couple we thought were missing, but we managed to find a couple as well, all small micros with wet logs. The really nice scenary made up for any shortcomings in the geocaching though, and we all had a great hike.

We returned for lunch, and then loaded up in the car for the last leg of our journey, down the 81 to Knoxville. No more geocaching stops, I didn't even check at our rest stops. We just jetted home. The total mileage of our road trip clocked in at 2374 miles, covering . I found 19 geocaches in 6 of the 12 different states we drove through. And I think I managed to find a decent balance of geocaching vs family needs for the trip. I used geocaching to break up the drive with diversion points, and little breaks, but it didn't drive the trip much at all, except for the one leg to find NY's oldest cache. So I'm a happy geocacher, my family is happy from our nice vacataion and we're all exhausted from all the driving. Now when's the next trip?