The North Ridge Trail Geocache Demon

There are demons out here in these woods. I haven't seen them, but they are there... Almost a year ago, I placed a geocache on the North Ridge Greenway. A geocache that you might call somewhat involved, with 9 stages spread out over almost 8 miles of trail. It was going to be awesome... But it was never found by geocachers, because it got pilfered. Well, geocachers like to say it got muggled. I wrote a long, sob-story post about it then, and made a mental note not to hide caches on this greenway. If there is someone who frequents that trail that takes geocaches, well, I'll jsut steer clear of it. And I've warned other local cachers about this trail as well. I'd hate for someone else to go through a bunch of grief of stolen geocaches.

But despite my warnings, some friends of mine Lullabye4U and Kaput360 began placing caches out on the trail. They are building a really cool Alice in Wonderland series of caches, with placements in Kingston and Oak ridge areas so far. They have wonderful Alice in Wonderland swag, really creative and fun containers, great cache write-ups. The series is going to be fantastic.

The kids and I went after 4 of these caches a few weeks ago, braving the cold. We found the caches just a day after the FTF, and only a few days after publication. This past week a few more AiW caches dropped and as luck would have it, we got snow and snow days. So I took the kids on a snowy hike and we nabbed a few FTFs on the series. The snow stopped us from getting all the new caches though, since the kids got a bit wet and cold after hiking a half mile.

We had an opportunity to go back this weekend and look for the one we missed. We hiked down to GZ and began looking in all these rabbit holes for an ammo ca, but cam up empty. I did note that there were some bootprints already at the site where the cache should ahve been, and at first had thought that a geocacher had beaten us to the find. But after finding nothing, I began to suspect something more sinister. A Geocache Demon!

On our hike out we passed by the spot where the Flamingo cache was and on a hunch I thought I'd check it out to see if it was still there. Sadly, it was not. The Geocacher Demon had nabbed these two geocaches in the last few days. I checked on one other cache in the series near the trailhead and it was still in play, but it may have survived since it is listed as a Mystery cache and is not at the posted coordinates. I hope the others in the series haven't gone missing as well, but I fear the worst. I was able to get in touch with Lullabye4u shortly after our hike and confirmed my suspicions about the cache we couldn't find. it should have been an easy ammo can right where we were looking. The Demon is here, and he wants our caches....