This year MOGA was in Lincoln, Nebraska. Home of the Cornhuskers… It was far enough away where driving up there and back just to compete in the Saturday competition really didn’t make sense, but after competing the last two years I wasn’t about to miss out, so I registered and made plans to fly out. No family would be coming with me, and my team-mates from the previous two years also wouldn’t be coming out. So it was looking like kind of a lonely affair for me. Flying out by myself, to compete in the individual race and defend my title from last year, but not really knowing people at the event, or having anyone to hang out with. Not that I mind, I’m kind of a loner anyways, preferring long solo hikes in the wilderness as my way to relax after a week of work. But it felt a little strange to be going to an event with hundreds of other geocachers and not really have folks to meet up with and do geocaching stuff.
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| Lincoln Capitol Building |
A month before the event, I decided I should at least try to put together a 4-man team and started contacting some of the Albuquerque area cachers that I thought might be interested. After sending out several emails I got responses from a couple geocachers saying that they would be interested and that we could talk about it during an event in ABQ that I was planning on attending. It there that I got my first two recruits, Budabelli (Brad) and Thoehn (Tom). Both are hard-core geocaches that have thousands and thousands of finds. Both are retired and have free time to take last-minute trips to far away states. And both are excellent hikers. I know this because the two of them are the first finders of all my long hiking geocaches that I’ve placed around the Santa Fe area. With them on-board, we almost had a team, but still needed a fourth person. I practically begged a few other local cachers to join us, but in the end it was an old caching buddy from back in Tennessee who heeded the call. Millasmommies12 (Laura, Tracee and Camilla) were planning on being at MOGA already and were not already part of a team. Laura jumped at the opportunity to join our team, and the Volunteer Chile Cachers were born.
The few weeks leading up to the competition I did my best to prepare myself and also our team. Brad and Tom had not competed at MOGA before so I gave them a run down of how the competition works and my general strategy. Laura knew the drill, having competed and medaled in previous MOGAs. I started running more regularly, trying to get in better shape for what I figured would be a long day of competing. This year, there was an added competition Friday night, a night race through the haunted woods. I had registered for this on top of the regular individual and 4-man comps which meant I would be running myself ragged. To train for that I literally ran myself ragged, pushing myself into dangerous dehydration the week before the competition while out trail-running on St. peter’s Dome. That certainly was not one of my better training ideas. My biggest concern going into the race was actually a technical one. My tried and trusty Garmin 60CSx was on the fritz and I wasn’t sure it would work at all. My new GPSr, a Garmin In Reach, somehow doesn’t lend itself to getting GPX files loaded easily. That left only my phone, which I generally don’t like geocaching with because I don’t trust the compass or GPS accuracy that much. Maybe that’s not fair of me though, I’ve certainly found a lot of geocaches with it now, but I much prefer a handheld GPSr.
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| View from my hotel window |
I flew out early Friday morning and arrived to sunny and hot weather in Lincoln Nebraska. I’ve driven through Nebraska before on various interstates, but never stopped longer than the time it takes to fill up gas. Not sure what I expected. Corn I guess, but early April is not prime corn tourism time. Fields were only just getting prepped for planning. I got my rental car and stopped at grocery store to get some sports drinks for the competition. There was a geocache across the street from the grocery store so I went over to score my first geocache find in Nebraska… only to DNF the little cache. I only searched for about 10 minutes though, I wanted to check into the hotel and figure out what I was going to do for the rest of the afternoon before the first competition. I arrived at the event hotel, got my room and texted Brad, Tom and Laura to see where everyone was and if I could meet up. Brad and Tom were west of town doing an immense (300+) geo-art in the shape of a hand. I wasn’t keen on power-trails so said I’d catch up with them alter. Laura and her family just got back from something called the WIG trail and were getting lunch. I had already eaten lunch, so I decided to head out on my own and check out some of the Lab Caches. Every MOGA event that I’ve been to has had Lab Caches associated with it. These are special temporary virtual caches that are set up to introduce folks to some of the areas cooler spots. In previous years, I’ve been too busy with the competitions to bother with the lab caches, or was tagging along with other geocachers who had already done them, so this year I decided to give them a shot. I ventured south of the downtown area and stopped at four lab cache locations, all sites where supposed paranormal activity has taken place. The locations were ok I guess, but I wasn’t all that impressed with the lab caches in general. They were the easiest sort of virtual cache, show up at a spot, find a key word or count something, answer a single questions on a website and BAM… cache complete. I’m not sure if lab caches are like this for every mega event, but if so I’m not really sure they are my thing. They are a quick smiley, and get you exploring the town, but I’d prefer to target interesting caches. The problem was, I hadn’t really prepared a geocaching itinerary for my trip. I had solved a few puzzles, and browsed a few of the high favorite caches, but never actually created a list of spots to visit. So instead of drive around and try to figure out where to go, I decided to just hang out in the park where the last Lab Cache took me, Wilderness Park. This park appeared to be a pretty large woodland with loads of walking trails and paths. Considering I hadn’t seen much woods anywhere else while driving around, this seemed like a pretty good place to walk around and stretch my legs. Plus, the night competition was going to be in these woods so I figured that getting familiar with the terrain could be a nice boon for me.
I ended up walking a little mile or so loop and finding a series of geocaches called the Witch of the Woods. This series was about a supposed with who lived in these woods and preyed on children. You had to find 4 shrines to various children that went missing in order to get parts of the coordinates for the final. Tossed in the middle of these geocaches was a an odd D/T rated cache called upper body strength (D/T=5/4). I would have rated this cache a 1.5/4.5, but then I have no problem pulling myself up on some monkey bars and finding the rather obvious nano cache on top. Others might have more difficulty and right as I was coming down from finding this cache a group of cachers showed up with a collapsible ladder and proceeded to have a merry old time climbing up and taking a big group photo. They were a friendly lot and we talked for a bit until we found out we knew some of the same geocachers, they knew the some of the TVG cachers pretty well including Diggin up Bones, BlackDot and QuarterMaster. It was fun to chat about the geocaching scene down in oak Ridge for a bit. In general, all the geocachers I ran into were very friendly and up for chatting, and I ran into geocachers all over the place. I did not run into any at the final for the Witch of the Woods though. This turned out to be a really cool final cache, with a sort of field puzzle where you had to find the right key out of a chain of 50 keys to unlock the container. Took me a while but I persisted.
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| Cachers I met at GC3XXTH, Upper Body Strength |
After a few hours out, I headed back to the hotel to get ready for the competition, stopping only briefly to pick up a quick dinner consisting of a footlong black forest subway sandwhich. I only ate half though, because it’s no fun running on a full stomach, and then geared up for the night competition.
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