KLGeocache: October 2010

ended this long dry spell of no geocaching finally yesterday. have been looking at doing the bear mountain series for about a month now and finally went yesterday with christy & moxie. yes i had other things i should have been doing, like looking for a job, but getting out on a good hike to just clear my head was just what i needed! (image: bear mountain from across bear pond)

we were in search of 13 caches total on the bear mountain trail, GC29H6J, GC29H6Z, GC29H78, GC29H7F, GC29H7N, GC29H7T, GC29H80, GC29H8M, GC29H8Y, GC29H90, GC29H95, GC2B6C3 & GC2B6C5.

after picking chris & mox up, doing some grocery shopping and throwing the ingredients of a beef & beer stew into the crock-pot we headed up rt. 4 to bear mountain. we started with the most obvious cache to begin with, GC29H6J, bear mountain gateway, we were searching in all the likely spots within the rock wall that was there along the road, me on one side and chris & mox on the other. all of a sudden i hear christy yell "mox, no, leave it". this peaked my interest and diverted me from finding the cache for a brief time. looks like moxie found a friend, a little raccoon that was sneaking its head out of the culvert that was either its home, or resting place for the day.

on a closer examination it looks like the little guys left eye was either missing, or had been severely hurt somehow. we fed him some of our granola bar before getting back to geocaching.

after our little wildlife adventure we found the cache quite quickly. the camo on the container was quite creative, with leaves and bark stuck to it so that it would blend in. the creativity of some of the people who place the caches never ceases to amaze me. chris found this one, we signed the log and continued on to the bear mountain trail.

past by the houses on the road before it turned into the trail and shortly came upon the gz for GC29H6Z, bear trail 1. chris was holding the gps for this one and she sent me off in one direction, i looked and looked and looked. then the gps said to go in a different direction, again i looked and looked. chris handed the gps over and i was able to give her the direction and feet within two minutes, this is all it took for an "i found it" cry from chris. we decided on a new rule, i hold the gps while chris goes to find the cache.

in this cache we found a travel bug, the first for both of us. a travel bug is "a trackable tag that you attach to an item. this allows you to track your item on geocaching.com. the item becomes a hitchhiker that is carried from cache to cache (or person to person) in the real world and you can follow its progress online." (from geocaching.com)

this travel bug is TB33843, 45th Anniversary. chris currently has it, so we will either drop it off somewhere together or she will drop it of on her own. i logged the tb's page with the following:

"picked it up from bear trail 1 on a cool, fall, maine day. once we got further up the mountain we even saw some snowflakes! was out caching with my sister-in-law christy & her service dog, moxie. this was each of our first trackable that we came across. i was just going to discover it, but after seeing that it was an anniversary tb i thought i would retrieve it, see, christy is only recently my sister-in-law as her brother and i just got married a little over two weeks ago not far from where we stood on bear mountain either. so i now have a new anniversary, 10.5.10, and thought i'd pass some newlywed love along with this very special anniversary tb!"

i was so wrapped up in the tb that i didn't write down if we took or left anything else.

on to GC29H78, bear trail 2, or the "military issue toothpick container" as christy called it. this was a quick micro find for chris and we were soon on to GC29H7F, bear trail 3. another quick find for chris! she's really good at this, must be all the military training. i took two wheat pennies from this cache and left a 10¢ euro. i collect wheat pennies and try to pick them up wherever i can. christy found this really cool looking gem stone, it looks maybe like smoky quartz. she wasn't going to take it because she didn't have anything to leave. i told her not to worry and i would find something for her to leave. this is when she first saw the contents of my new geocaching backpack (awesome l.l. bean bag i got as a fundraising incentive for the dempsey challenge). i recently did some house cleaning and found a bunch of random items that i don't need/use but that were worth more than a indefinite detention in the trash can -- worth more to a geocacher that is! she was able to take the stone and i left in its place a glass star gem.

next was on to our most time consuming cache of the day, GC29H7N, bear trail 4. with a difficulty & terrain rating right around where all the others were listed i have no idea why it took us so long to locate this one! oh, wait, yes i do... the gps was going CRAZY! i don't know if it was the tree cover or the clouds or perhaps even the snow, but the gps kept pointing in one general direction from the trail, but once i started going in that direction it would get all screwy and point us all over the place. i don't know how many times i tried to reset the navigation by going back to the trail or how many places christy looked but it took us forever to find this one! but christy doesn't like to give up, as she put it, "i want to win, although geocaching isn't really a winning sport, i still want to win!" she definately won this one.

after looking and looking and looking in so many possible hiding spaces chris was admiring the surroundings, "i really like this rock foundations, awww.... fuckers!" she had found it! the killer of it was that it wasn't really hidden that much at all, just in a spot we hadn't looked at and that the gps wasn't near pointing to in the least! after some more cursing, and having moxie help in retrieving the cache it was on to our next cache.

i was getting a bit worried that we wouldn't finish the series as the battery was getting lower and lower on the gps. next we traveled on to GC29H7T, bear trail 5. chris found this one while talking on the phone, it was a relatively quick find, any would be really compared to the last cache! knowing that our gps live time was limited i decided to leave my

own tb, KC's Dog Tag in this cache. i originally wanted to drop it off when i had kc with me but her best buddy, moxie, was a worthy stand in today. i am excited to see where the mini kc travels! the goal for my tb is for it to travel to every us state with other doggie friends to other pup friendly caches. i know that this specific of a goal may limit how often the tb is picked up and moved, but it's all in the story, there is no time limit for this little guy!

after saying goodbye to the mini kc, we were off to find GC29H80, bear trail 6. the coords were right on for this one and guess what..... I ACTUALLY FOUND THE CACHE! it was another matchstick container, so we signed the log and we were off.

unfortunately when i looked down to set the gps towards the next cache the screen was blank. buh-bye batteries. chris thought it would be easy enough to try to find the caches with out the gps, we tried by counting our strides, but that didn't really work, so we decided to just go to the top of the mountain anyway and comeback another day and finish up the series. 7 caches in one day, not too shabby! may be a record for me! actually, i just checked and it ties the total of caches in one day to the other day that chris & i went caching while on our way to arundel.

i am certainly glad we decided to go to the top, as the views were absolutely stunning! a bit cold and windy up top, but again worth it! i doubt these pictures do the views any justice, but enjoy them anyway.