2500! Night cache adventure

Two thousand and five hundred geocaches.. ooph... that is a lot. And when you've been playing this game for almost 4 years, and found this many geocaches, you end up behaving oddly at such milestones. You feel the need to make sure the particular geocache you find on whatever arbitrary milestone, is one that embodies what you like best about the game. At elast, that's what I do. And I recognize how absurd it is. Especially the behavior of not finding geocaches in order to ensure that the one I find for the milestone is something specific. Because does it really matter if that specific geocache is the 2500th, or the 2501st? Yes.... yes it does.

So for this mini milestone, a quarter of the way to 10K, I set my sights on a night cache planted at Tellico Lake, along some trails I've never visited before. I've done a few night caches before, but never one that involved over a mile of hiking. So it felt like something new and fun to try, something worth a little extra effort. I put out a call on the local geocaching Facebook group and found some other cachers interested in meeting up to to it. Even my son was keen on coming, so it was shaping up to be a fun outing. I packed up a ridiculous amount of flashlights, powerful 18-volt ones, tiny finger lights, flashing strobes for the dog to wear. Next I made sure that we'd be warm enough, the forecast was for below freezing temperatures. Everything in order, we drove out as the sun set.

Team JoshShnn and Sasha

We met team Joshshnn at the trailhead and set off immediately. I had met Joshshnn a few weeks earlier at an event and my son really wanted to go caching with them. They are a fun family that likes hiking and exploring the area, as well as caching. They had never done a night cache before, but immediately took the lead on the trail, looking for the reflective tacks that would lead us to the cache. The first few tacks we found were of the wrong type, at least for the geocache. They were placed by hunters perhaps, but gave us a taste of what we might be looking for. We didn't find one of the "proper" tacks until we had hiked for about 1/2 mile. And even after that, the tacks were spaced apart pretty far. so far that you couldn't see the next one until you hiked further along the trail. This was a little different than what I was expecting. The night caches I've done before use the reflective tacks to make a trail, where you follow one, then another along a route. This cache was set up so that you simply followed a good trail, and every once in a while you would see a reflective tack letting you know that you still had more to hike. And the hike was over a mile, so doing it this way makes sense. If you had to place tacks within sight of eachother, it would take many dozens. This way, the CO got away with placing fewer tacks, but still providing a fun night caching adventure.

The cache was a nice big ammo can full of goodies, easily found when reached the right pattern of reflective tacks. The Joshshnn team was nice enough to let Levin "make" the find, and he was pretty happy about the whole thing. The hike home was tough on him though. We were up past his bedtime, it was cold and dark, and he was tired. But like a trooper he kept on going. And me, I'm at 2500 geocaches found, and I'm still going too.