Fugads Geocaching Blog: Mystery of Fontana: Part 1

A few months ago we visited Fontana dam for swimming and geocaching and I noticed an interesting unknown cache up there called the Mystery of Fontana. It is a fairly lonely cache, with only 19 finds over 9 years, but the just about everyone who has tackled it goes on and on about how it is one of the best multi cache adventures in North Carolina. Since some of these finders seem to be pretty active cachers, this seemed plausible to me, and multi-cache adventures make up some of my favorite caches of all time. In fact, I keep a bookmark list called Really Awesome Multi Cache Adventures. And after over a year of living in Tennessee, I haven't added one eastern cache to the list. Multi caches seem to be really rare out here, rarer than earthcaches by far. It may also be that I just haven't visited the right areas of the state for these awesome multi cache adventures. But this Fontana Cache appears to be just the kind of cache I love. So I started hacking away at the puzzle.

Beginning the journey

Once I sat down to solve the puzzle, I made pretty good progress. The puzzle is very much detective work, but also lays an entire backstory to set the stage for this cache. There is a fictitious mining company, a mysterious disappearance, company cover-up. Very intriguing. I dug into it and finally got to what I assumed was the puzzle itself, and then got got stymied. After a few weeks, I finally decided to ask for help, reaching out to both the CO, and also a local geocacher friend, Pokerluck, who I thought would be interested in this caching adventure and is also good at solving puzzles. I received responses from both, with the CO giving me a generous hint allowing me to see the solution, and David also solving it and giving me a hint, practically at the same time. I had to slap my head, since the solution was much simpler than I had thought, I was way overthinking it. Oh well, with a solution, David and I made plans to go after the cache.

Rough bushwhacking

Hidden waterfalls along the way

Making those plans was tricky, from the logs we knew that the cache involved 6 stages, and took you all over the place. At least one group of previous finders mentioned using a boat for a stage and neither David or I had access to a boat. But we decided to go after it anyways and get as far as we could. I was hopeful that there would be a non-boat way to complete the cache, maybe with only a short swim and some bushwhacking. So I packed all my swimming gear, as well as headlamps, plenty of water and all my hiking stuff. We had to be prepared for anything.

Cool in theme containers

Some of the trickier terrain

David and I met up at the Deals Gap Motorcycle Resort, where we left one of our vehicles and continued on to the first stage. We made some stops along the way, at a few earthcaches and one traditional, but mostly we were focused on our goal. I'd hate to reveal too much about the cache, since discovering what it is all about is a big part of the fun, but I will say that we were successful in completing the first 4 stages, although one of the stages proved to be too difficult terrain for David. ON that stage, David gave me a half an hour to up ahead and see if I could find the clue. I barely found it in time, it was a doozy and certainly the hardest terrain we did all day. What makes this geocache great is how each stage continues the story that the initial puzzle had started. The containers fit the theme, and even feel authentic, at least the original ones (a few stages had been replaced). The story is very cool. By the time we had completed the fourth stage though, and computed where the next one was, it was 3pm. That next stage is a challenging one, one that having a boat would make things easier. It did appear to be doable on foot, but only with a pretty serious amount of hiking. I was getting myself psyched up to go for it, although David said he was done for the day. Then it started thundering overhead and I decided I didn't want to be out on a long hike in the rain. Especially since I might not get back until after dark. So we both ended up calling it a day. But we will be back. Now that we know what we are up against, it's only a matter of time.