Maybe There Should Be a Souvenir for Images Posted...

Finding caches used to be "about the journey." Now the numbers seem to be king. Has anyone noticed uploading images at cache finds no longer seems to be an activity. As we found the caches in bd's fun state series in PA State Gamelands 69, we noticed there were few images uploaded on any of the cache pages unless they were ours.

Yesterday we enjoyed the Saturday of our holiday weekend by hiking in Elk State Forest. The Fred Woods Trail is home to the cache Dobby's Home. The August 2001 cache is one of the older caches in the state and has a 40 percent favorite rating (43/233). The hike includes great rock formations and a at least one vista (two if you do the loop). The 233 finders have posted 208 images. It sounds impressive, but the last image was posted by us on a return visit in June 2013. Almost five years have passed with no images posted, not even a selfie.

In a time when nearly all cachers have cell phones and nearly all phones have reasonable image ablities, adding an image to a log is easy. Have the next few finds become so important and the presence of so many mediocre caches become so large that the memories of a wonderful journey are just blurred and not worth a picture? In the 2018 specialty world of one person driving, one person navigating, one person jumping from the vehicle for caches on the right side of the road, and one person jumping from the vehicle for caches on the left side of the road, it would seem someone would have time for an image or two.

This is my post from our July 2009 visit to the area. This is from June 2013.

For yesterday's visit, we did enjoy the rocks again.

We stopped by the second overlook...

and Ali spotted an orchid.

We also were third to find on a new cache on the trail and will post images to our log.

Caches To Do: GC12FPA

I sometimes spot caches that go on my to-do list. There is no real explanation of why or how they make it, but they do.

Big Ball of Paint has now joined that list. The ball of paint is quirky enough to grab my attention and they sound like really nice people. I will have business reasons to travel I-69 between Fort Wayne and Indy so this seems like a great place to stop for a break. ;)

Dumb Cache Idea of the Week

Here's a not so great idea, shove a pipe in the ground (not permitted within the geocaching listing guidelines) then create a cache from a fake natural gas regulator.

Missed FTF's

I was in Monterrey for business and spent Sunday afternoon hiking with my engineer. He wanted to show me the waterfalls at the end of a trail near the far end of Estanzuela Park. It sounded like the perfect way to spend the afternoon. I had loaded my gps on the hope that I might be near a cache or two while in the area. The hike back was an interesting venture. Besides a high climb, the park has placed brick walkways on the inclines. We saw a number of other visitors fall and even a few injuries. We also saw coati, but my memory card decided to eat ~40 images from the journey. :(

We stopped on the way to see the sights.

The Falls were really scenic.

Even more interesting was the gps. It showed this unfound cache was about 700 feet from the falls. This unfound cache was about 1000 feet from upstream from the falls. Could it be two unfound caches waiting almost four years were within our grasp? I must admit, this was really exciting.

We crossed the stream and made our way towards the nearest of the unfound hides. We were back in the stream and within 300 feet of the hide when the trail whistle blew. Oh no, we were being called of the trail because of the time of day. Because of the injury risks and the presence of black bears, the area we were in closed a few hours before the rest of the park. We hung our head and made our way back.

Overall, this was an extremely strenuous journey. The area closed for entries very early so we were pushing hard all the way to the restricted area. The 700 feet from the trail to the cache appears to be mostly in the fast moving stream. Having been so close, I eagerly await the return challenge first-to-find or not.