MOGA 2019

For the fourth year in a row I competed in the Midwest Open Geocaching Adventure or MOGA. Unlike previous years (2016, 2017, and 2018) this year was not a mega-event. I don't know any of the details, but somehow the people that have been putting on these events every year decided that all the production needed for a mega event wasn't going to happen, at least not this year. In fact, there were even rumors that 2017 would be the last MOGA event ever. But that didn't happen. Instead the theme for this year was "Going Back to the Roots" and the event was put together much as it was for the very first MOGA. It would be about the competition and it would take place at a large reservoir in Missouri, Mark Twain lake.

As the winner of the Feldmeier cup at last year's MOGA, I felt compelled to compete. I really do enjoy the fun of competing in the race, but it is also hard for me to separate out how much of that enjoyment is rooted in me placing very well. Ok, I'm being modest, every year I've competed I've won in some category or another. And each year, I need to think long and hard about how to justify flying myself out to the event location (or driving... but recently that's been too much to ask), staying in a hotel, spending time away from work and family for this event. For a long time I convinced myself that it was actually a pretty major geocaching event, a mega event, that it meant something to geocachers. But this year's attendance made me rethink this. The event was well attended, likely with over a hundred geocachers. But it had the feeling more of a regional event, that mostly just locals would attend. And I bet their are plenty of other mega events and races I could go to that would seem more... significant? Is that the right word? Should I look into other adventure races that maybe wouldn't require such a long trip? Are there other geocaching related races that are bigger (someone mentioned one in Texas, and also something called the West Bend Ca$he Ba$h where there are cash prizes). Should I look into those as an outlet for my urge to run around the woods and find geocaches? Serious questions to ponder as I reflect on MOGA 2019... but I'll let those questions sit idle for now. There will be time to ponder this later.

As with last year, I chose to fly out to the event area and stay in a hotel/B&B. That meant flying into St. Louis and renting a car and making the 2 hour drive up to the competition area. A bit more travel time than last year, but still reasonable. I took a day off work Friday as my travel day and got an early flight out of Santa Fe, connecting through Dallas, and made it to St. Louis by noon. Rather than find any caches along my drive up to the competition area, I decided to book it as fast as I could North so I could meet up with my 4-man team. I would be reuniting with Lostsole, Sequoia and Kim--possible for the 4-man comp, the same team that won the cup back in 2016 and came in second in 2017. Geofairy76 was there as our cheering squad. Team TKO! Never mind that the "T" from TKO was no longer applicable as I didn't hail from Tennessee anymore, we were sticking with that name. I was looking forward to seeing them again as they are really fun group of cachers. They had planned on doing the new MOGA geoart starting around 2:30 and if I made good time I'd be able to meet them out there for some caching before the registration event. The drive up was pretty boring. I've never been to Missouri before, but it felt like there was never anything all that interesting to look at on the drive. The landscape was mostly flat, with a lot of farms and woods. The towns I passed were tiny, aging rural spots. I kept looking for an exit with a good supermarket but was soon way out in farmland and the small towns I passed barely had anything. Eventually the little town of Perry had a small-town grocer and I stopped in to see what kind of race fuel I could get. Forget cliff bars, and energy goo and coconut water...you wouldn't find any of that stuff out in this little store. I opted for snickers bars and sports drinks. Probably just as good as the more expensive race fuels. Snickered up I kept driving and finally reach Mark Twain lake. By the time I reached the lake, it was already 3pm and I knew I would have to catch up to my fellow team-mates, who were on the other side of the lake. So I indulged myself in a geocaching stop at the Birthplace of Mark Twain, which was on my way around the lake. Snapped a quick picture of the Feldmeier cup, got the answers to the Virtual Cache, and was on my way around the lake.

I met up with Marty, Kim, Melodie and Tom at the Indian Creek Campground. I was working on completing  a WhereIgo cartridge when they pulled up. They were probably 2/3s of the way done with the Geoart,but I hopped in the jeep with them and got to complete the rest of it in good company. The Geo-Art was a roadside one, so we drove short distances and then hopped out to find the caches. There was one geocache outside of the Geoart that we decided to walk to called the Monolith. It was a 2001 inspired hide from a previous year's MOGA. A very cool hide, but hiking out made us realize that we would get pretty beaten up by the underbrush. Most of the underbrush looked like small knee-to-thigh high saplings, but mixed in were some brambles. Running through it would guarantee you got scratched up. And also... we soon found ticks crawling up our legs. Man I hate ticks. It's been so nice not to have to worry about them for the last few years.

Finishing up the Geo-Art (I got the M and part of the O), we then headed over to the Friday night registration event. I turned in the Feldmeier trophy and signed up for both the Individual and Team competitions the next day. The visitor center where the event was held had a nice scenic overlook out over the reservoir. I saw a few familiar faces, but not too many. And those that I did see I couldn't always remember their names. There was the guy with the full sized Skeleton Trackable, there was a guy from St. Louis that I recognize from every year and say hi to but never remember his name (I think it is Steve?... and his geocaching name Forest-Ghost). There was the husband-wife team that dominated the puzzle competition the last few years. And numerous other people that said hi and threatened to break my ankles to keep me from winning this year. I was getting psyched to compete.

Looking out over Mark Twain lake

The MOGA trophies ready for the comp

Kim had researched an Air B&B for us to stay at in Hannibal, so after a little bit of socializing we headed to Hannibal, about 40 minutes away and got settled in a cool little historic house near downtown Hannibal. The owner of the B&B had a restaurant next door, that was a mix of Turkish, Mediterranean, French and American cuisines. A fun eclectic spot to dine, and the host was very kind to us. We tried to explain the geocaching race to him. Not sure how seriously he took us, but he told us if we won a trophy to come back and he'd take our picture. Tired from traveling all day, caching and a good meal, I crashed out right away.

I got up before the dawn to get ready for the competition. Kim--possible was also competing in the Individual Comp this year so we drove out to Mark Twain lake together and got out in the chill morning air to get the race details. 30 punches spread out over the tip of the peninsula where the campground was. None of the caches were further than 3/4 mile from the race start/finish, so it looked very doable to get all 30 punches in the 2.5 hour time. I plotted my route and shared my thoughts with Kim, who decided to try the same approach as I was. There wasn't a whole lot to decide about running the course, there was a very logical path connecting all the punches in what appeared to be the most efficient way. The only real choice was, clockwise or counterclockwise. I chose clockwise. The sun was rising in the sky and the morning was getting warmer. All the competitors gathered for a group photo and the race officials explained the rules, then we were off!

Individual Competition Start

Kim and I headed off in the opposite direction as most of the competitors, along the road to the west, skipping the closest cache and heading for punch #5. I soon outpaced Kim and was heading out through the woods to find my next punches. A couple of the hides took me longer than I was anticipating though. One in particular I searched for maybe 5 minutes before spotting it way up high in a sapling. I had to bend the tree over to punch my card. 5 minutes may not seem like much time, but when it only takes a couple minutes to run between locations, 5 minutes feels like a long time. I passed Kim on my way back to punch #6, which was the first one that really took me a while. Another pair of geocachers joined me looking for this one and I finally spotted it buried in some leaves along the base of a rotted stump. The next several punches went by quickly but I got stalled out when I reached punch #15. A few other geocachers were looking for this one already, and then more joined us. Kim eventually caught up to me here, and there was quite a large posse of us combing the hillside looking for this elusive cache. I must have spent 20 minutes here, maybe longer. I thought about skipping it, but with the course being as small as it appeared, if I skipped it there was a good chance that it would be found by the large group, then someone else would finish the course with more points than me. So I hung around, hoping it would turn up, and that I would have enough time left over to run the rest of the course. I was a little over half-way through the course, and had made good time on most of it, and if I could keep that up after this one, maybe I would be ok. But the other cachers were also talking about how some that they had come from were hard to find also, and I worried that I'd get stuck on another punch later. After what felt like forever, punch #15 was found buried in some leaf litter by the base of a little tree and we all crowded around to punch our cards and get going again. It felt good to be off and running again but I was having to really watch the time now. I cruised through the next few caches and then got stuck again at Punch #13. This was one that others had mentioned as being tough to find. There were a few large downed trees near GZ and I looked and looked, and spent another good 15-20 minutes looking for this cache. But time was quickly passing and I couldn't look too long. I made the tough call to skip this cache and make sure I could finish the rest of the course in the allotted time, hoping that no other cacher would be able to get all 30 punches. Or if they did, that they would come in after the 2.5 hour time limit. Immediately after punch 13 I hit another obstacle at Punch #12, another tough hide. This time, a fellow cacher was there looking for the cache so I had some company. I searched around desperately, wanting to make a quick find, but also not wanting to leave any stick un-turned. I kept checking the time remaining, and was beginning to worry. The other cacher decided to give up and as he started heading away I spotted a tiny bit of the metal cable that attached the cache to the base of a small tree, and shouted "found it"! I had 4 caches left in 20 minutes. Doable, but it would be close. I ran hard to each one and luckily, found them all without too much search time. I pushed myself hard to finish strong and plopped my card down with 10 minutes to spare. Rats, I could have searched for #13 more! I spent the last 10 minutes of the race waiting to see if anyone else would finish with all 30 punches. There was one particular pair of cachers that worried me, the husband-wife puzzle cachers from Ohio. But it was also possible that Kim would complete the course with all 30 punches. I sat there sipping on my sports drink and waiting to see who would come in. Kim came in with a few minutes to spare, and completed the course with 27 punches. With 2 minutes remaining, we spotted the Ohio couple, and they were looking beat. The race official shouted out, 2 minutes left, and they started hustling to the finish line. They managed to slap their punch card on the table with just seconds to spare, and then collapsed on the ground. Did they finish all 30 punches..... NO! They skipped punch #5 in order to make it back to the finish without getting penalized. Turns out they had made a blunder towards the end and think they could have gotten #5 if they had altered their route slightly, but they had noticed that they had missed #5 too late.

Individual Competition Map

The rest of team TKO had arrived and we had a bit of time before the Team Competition started so we drove over to the Mark Twain Birthplace so that everyone could get the Virtual Cache there. Lucky for us, a school group was just leaving and they had tons of extra sandwiches which they were offering up to anyone who wanted one. I was famished, and grabbed a nice big deli sandwich to fuel me for the rest of the day. One of the cool things we saw at the overlooks and trails near the birthplace museum were signs showing how high the water had reached in the 2008 floods.

We drove back to the team competition area, a mile or so up the road from the previous competition. A throng of geocachers were milling around, getting the course maps and downloading waypoints into GPSrs and phones. Our team got our maps and sat down to strategize. Again, dividing up the course looked pretty straightforward, with four quadrants each having roughly the same amount of punches. Marty and I would take the quadrants that were further away and would entail more running. Kim and Tom took the closer caches. We checked to see that our text messaging worked ok. Cellphone reception at the lake wasn't reliable, and sometimes our group messaging wouldn't go through. But if we made person-to-person text messages or calls our phones seemed to work ok. Based on the morning competition, we knew me might be faced with some hard to find caches, and we had a plan to contact the team member in the neighboring quadrant to ask for help if needed. All set to go, we lined up with the other competitors and soon the race was on.

Team Competition Map

My quadrant would take me east and I had an option to run out there on roads, but I could save a lot of distance by cutting through the woods, which I did. I ended up passing by one of the punches in Tom's quadrant and punched it to my card, just in case. Mostly I just got into a nice rhythm of jogging through the underbrush. I had a mile to go for my first punch. Unlike the individual competition, the team competition caches were spaced out a little more, with roughly 0.2 miles between caches. This meant more running between finds, but since we were dividing up the 30 punches between the four of us, we had less to find. The first two punches in my quadrant that I went to were #48 and #49, both of which I found without too much fuss. They also gave me some nice views of the lake. The next one gave me fits. #50 was on the edge of the woods near a playground, and I searched for a good long while. Eventually another geocacher showed up and started looking too, but after 15 minutes or so, I decided that I should finish the rest of the caches in my quadrant and then return to this one to see if I could find it when maybe more geocachers were around. The other 4 geocaches in my quadrant were pretty quick to find and I soon found myself back at #50. Searching every nook and cranny, digging through the leaf litter, going up to 90ft from GZ. Other geocachers showed up and joined me in searching, but all of them gave up after some time. I must have been there for 30 minutes, at least that's what it felt like. The text messages I received from my team told me that they had completed their quadrants, and that they were already back at the finish line. All that was left was #50. That and I would need to run the mile back to the finish line as quickly as possible. I still had a good amount of time remaining in the competition, but again I was faced with the decision of choosing to pass up on this punch and risk our team getting less points than another, or waiting too long and allowing another team to beat our time. Ultimately, I decided that I had spent enough time looking for #50 and it just wasn't going to be found. All the other geocachers that had stopped by it also had given up, so I was betting that no one would find this punch. That left me with one final push to run back to the finish line. My knees were scratched and bleeding from running through the brambles, and I was tired and hot, but I pushed hard and powered to the finish line where my team was waiting for me. We put all our punch cards together and slapped them down on the race official table, who called out our time: 1 hour 41 minutes. We weren't the first competitors to turn in punch cards, but we felt pretty good that we were the first team back that had visited all 30 punch locations. We didn't stick around to cheer the other teams though, we wanted to drive back to Hannibal to get cleaned up before the awards ceremony that evening.

Team TKO just after finishing the race

After showering and making sure we got all the ticks off of us (I had received a handful of tick-bites, all on my right leg for some reason), we had a bit of time for some caching in downtown Hannibal. We were able to visit two of the Virtual Caches in town before heading back out west to Monroe City where the award ceremony was held. The MOGA organizers kept the award ceremony brief, the briefest of all the MOGAs I had yet attended. They called out the winners in each category, sometimes poking fun at categories that didn't have very many contestants. One woman placed 3rd after finding only 1 punch in the individual competition. The level of competition certainly was less than it had been in any previous MOGA I had been to. But the room was still crowded, with over a hundred geocachers listening to the results of the competitions. As I had expected, I won the Feldmeier cup again for the Individual Competition. The 4-man awards were announced and another team had completed 29 punches, but with a slower time than TKO, so we were once again crowned the winners of the MOGA cup!

We celebrated with a hearty meal at the Fiddlesticks restaurant and a pitcher of beer which we poured into the etched pint glasses my wife had made for our team, each displaying our team name and geocaching handle. We also made sure to stop by at the Bistro where our Air B&B owner worked to prove to him that he had the winning-est guests! Not sure how impressed he was, but he played the part well.

Sadly, I had to leave early the next morning so that I wouldn't miss my flight back to Santa Fe. It would have been fun to hang out some more with TKO and find some more interesting caches in the area. Next year perhaps. MOGA 2020 will be at Mark Twain Lake again, and we have a title to defend.

I made good time back to St. Louis and had enough time to spare for a little geocaching, mainly a stop by the Gateway arch. The downtown was very nice, especially on a cool and quiet morning. Not a bad ending to my first trip to Missouri.

The plane I was in gently lifted off from Lambert Field, I had a nice sense of satisfaction from my trip. It may look like a foolish thing for a middle aged man to fly out for a weekend trip to the middle of nowhere and compete in a relatively unheard of competition. But to me it felt just right.