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.